
ByteDance is going from strength to strength - jkuria
https://www.economist.com/business/2020/04/16/bytedance-is-going-from-strength-to-strength
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xiaolingxiao
I think one part of its success is that TikTok really hit a nerve w/ its core
social appeal: miming to pop culture artifacts. For those of you who remember
Youtube back when it was just a sketchy looking website in a sea of seedy
websites, the 2nd (?) video that ever went viral was this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1LZVmn3p3o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1LZVmn3p3o).
In essence the same concept as TikTok. Just to take the message home, singing
along is one aspect of social miming, from it there's endless variations, so
endless potential to create content. And once you generalize from miming top10
songs to miming challenges created by other people, you arrive at the heart of
TikTok's social mechanics: it's not just creating videos or remixing songs,
it's creating culture, conforming to it, and bending it towards yourself.

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api
They've nailed the formula for addictive social media apps. I discourage
people from using TikTok, but I've played with it and it hits all the notes
and delivers small hits of dopamine effectively.

What they're doing with social apps reminds me of what happened to pop music:

[https://nypost.com/2015/10/04/your-favorite-song-on-the-
radi...](https://nypost.com/2015/10/04/your-favorite-song-on-the-radio-was-
probably-written-by-these-two/)

Once you nail the addictive formula and get it to drive network effects, the
rest is pretty easy. Warehousing vast amounts of data at scale and doing
analytics on it is no longer hard, unlike back in the early oughts when
Facebook started. The addictive formula and network effect is the only thing
you have to master. The rest can be rented from cloud companies.

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throwaway122378
China should allow non-Chinese social media companies from operating in
mainland China or else international governments should ban Chinese social
media companies from operating in their borders.

This is absurd. China is surveilling the world with their apps now.

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balola
I'm starting to think that this kind of idea is dangerous.

Chinese apps are left unchecked as long as they are loyal to the regime, but
international companies would be held accountable back home for their actions
in China, in an inevitable race to the bottom, this is competitive
disadvantage and outsiders are doomed to fail.

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neonate
[https://archive.md/jjjRS](https://archive.md/jjjRS)

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sdwa
Can anyone explain to me why this has gone to the moon and Vine died? To an
uneducated observer such as myself, TikTok and Vine are basically the same.
What separates TikTok?

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9nGQluzmnq3M
Vine was killed, it didn't die.

Also, Vines felt really standalone. TikTok manages to feel both like a
community and like cable TV: you can choose to interact with replies and
remixes, or you can just passively sit back and let it serve you an endless
array of amusing 15-second clips, with a stream that quickly learns what you
like and shows you more of it.

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fufiejfjrso
> it is now the world’s biggest unlisted technology “unicorn”, recently valued
> at between $90bn and $100bn

You know, maybe there's actually nothing incorrect about these astronomical
unicorn valuations. Maybe the Reverse Flynn Effect is causing our society to
place economic value in different areas than it did in the past.

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notechback
Just like Netflix bring more valuable than Disney. Absurd on every measure.

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lawrenceyan
TikTok is pretty much a carbon copy of Vine. If Twitter wasn't able to make
money from Vine, ultimately choosing to shut it down, is this a sign that apps
like TikTok are fundamentally unprofitable or that Twitter is just a poorly
run company unable to monetize their products?

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throwaway122378
Profit is the least of their concern. Tik Tok is backed by the Chinese govt.
The more downloads the more spying.

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diebeforei485
Has anyone here tried using their Lark suite (looks to be a G Suite
competitor)? I'd love to hear more details about it, because they've done a
great job on TikTok/Douyin regardless of the issues with CCP.

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raverbashing
Expect Mr. Zuckerberg to lobby even more for regulatory capture and seed FUD
(some of which is justified) in (vain) hope he'll win this battle.

Though to be fair, most of the growth now is coming from his secondary brands,
WhatsApp and Instagram, which seem they're being better run.

