How TikTok Is Rewriting the World

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/10/style/what-is-tik-tok.html

by ProAm • 7 years ago

34 31 7 years ago

alvatech• 7 years ago

I'm not a TikTok user but recently my Instagram explore Tab is filled with re-uploads of the videos created in TikTok. So it looks like it's getting insanely popular.

rasz• 7 years ago

so are pr0n video aggregators

scotty79• 7 years ago

Adult version of TikTok might be interesting. This might be purely adult user generated entertainment or sort of a dating app.

anfilt• 7 years ago

No it is not rewriting the world...

marpstar• 7 years ago

Take the post title and replace TikTok with any startup you've heard about on HN. Beyond cliche at this point.

snaky• 7 years ago

With any startup with half billion active monthly users.

silkspire• 7 years ago

It's not rewriting the world, it's just showing us a snapshot of the future.

nathanaldensr• 7 years ago

Hyperbole, anyone?

ilaksh2• 7 years ago

A few weeks back I heard about TikTok on HN. So I installed it. I looked at some of the videos it was feeding me for like half an hour. I'm 41 years old so to me they mostly looked like kids or teenagers. About half of the videos were mildly amusing but trivial, and maybe half I could barely watch because they were so excessively cutsey or repetitive that I could not tolerate them.

So I forgot about it and did not open the app after that. But then every few days or whatever I would get a notification and it was TikTok. What I remember was that it was mainly random teenage girls saying or doing something trivial and mildly entertaining or just stupid but while they were doing it they were subtly showing off their legs or bodies in some way.

Since I'm not a teenager and half of the videos were quite annoying, I had to uninstall it.

mrweasel• 7 years ago

The New York Times description of TikTok as a service makes it sound absolutely awful, but that might be due of my age.

berberous• 7 years ago

Here's two Twitter threads of some of the worst or TikTok. It's so so bad it's kind of funny:

https://twitter.com/kenjac/status/1099426350488866818?s=21

https://twitter.com/mikaela_wild/status/1097558817364234241?...

accnumnplus1• 7 years ago

Similarly, tried it a few weeks back. Didn't last five minutes.

nickthegreek• 7 years ago

I'm a pretty avid tiktok user as I like to keep up with what the youth are into. It has a great video editor and allows its users to create some really interesting content. I CONSTANTLY have tiktok sound samples stuck in my head all day long.

The issues where it hurts is INSANE data usage and the fact that you basically need headphones to use it. Audio is so important to the experience and coupled with the data usage, it is hard to get lost in the app when not in private/wifi. Even with those 2 restrictions, it gets more eye time from me than instagram/snap chat and facebook combined.

It does tend to track to a younger age group, but many of those users were on the app when it was still musically, showing some real power to keep a userbase year over year. And then you have a ton of users who came to it once vine collapsed.

It is the only social media app that I use where I don't know anyone IRL that I follow. I think that is a big distinction from all the other big players.

jerf• 7 years ago

The ads for it that YouTube has shown me have been deeply underwhelming. A "mildly amusing but trivial" video isn't particularly helped by having the amusing-but-trivial thing happen on one half of the screen while someone "reacts" on the other half. And, yeah, the "amusing" thing hasn't even been all that amusing.

It could be wonderful, but I'm entitled to assume that advertising is "best foot forward" and conclude accordingly.

There's a frequently-quoted XKCD cartoon about how the world is so big that it's always the first time that someone has heard about something. It's always someone's first time to watch some silly cat videos, crazy pratfalls, and stupid stunts. We all do it, and I'm not going to say there's anything wrong with it. What I will say is that it never seems to be a sustainable business; things like TikTok seem to burn through the available "fresh new underbrush" really quickly, then it's another year or two before the next hot thing like this shows up and quickly burns through all the people for whom this is new.

AllegedAlec2• 7 years ago

I'm still not sure on how TikTok is different from Vine...

michaelbuckbee• 7 years ago

It's not - it started with a little more structure "lip sync" but now it's just short form vids.

buddylw• 7 years ago

It still exists for one.

I miss vine.

billfruit• 7 years ago

Makes you wonder why they shutdown vine.

egypturnash• 7 years ago

https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/28/13456208/why-vine-died-t... kinda suggests a mix of reasons:

* vine’s founders resisted aggressive monetization * instagram added short videos and did monetize them a lot * marketers quit spending money on sponsored vines and started spending it on sponsored instagrams * twitter just kinda sat on their thumbs with regards to putting any resources into vine, the founders drifted away

tokyodude• 7 years ago

It's the culture that different. I have not idea what the culture of Vine was but it's nothing like the culture of TikTok. If I understand correctly this is the culture of TikTok

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bonbibonkers

pavlov• 7 years ago

The Information wrote recently [1] that ByteDance (owner of TikTok) has been spending billions on overseas marketing for TikTok, apparently spending more than $300M on just Google Ads in 2018.

It's working in some large markets but not others:

"Compared to the exponential growth in India, cracking the U.S. market has been more challenging. While TikTok became one of the most downloaded apps in the U.S., the number of people who actively use the app is far less impressive. TikTok’s 30-day user retention rate in the U.S. has been around 10%, compared to more than 30% in India, people with knowledge of the matter said."

[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/chinas-bytedance-pla...?

KangLi• 7 years ago

It's crap. An app enjoying its peak moment. In 2 years it will be gone

Simulacra• 7 years ago

It feels like Vine 2.0 but for kids. I don't see this lasting long.

YUMad3• 7 years ago

Tiktok is very exploitative.

Teenage girls seekin attention through showing skin and acting provocative is nothing new, but tiktok is amplifying it to hitherto unseen levels. Some of these girls have multiple millions of followers while their content is mostly repetitive uninspired lipsyncing while gyrating the bottom or flapping the chestbags.

Tiktok has a face-narrowing filter enabled by default; it makes your jaw look much more narrow and gives you a pointy chin, making you look younger and more attractive. It cant be turned off afaik.

The hordes of predominantly male followers donate significant amount of money, of course. Tiktok takes its cut, of course. What % do you think it is? It's not 2-5% like most donating platforms. It's not even the high 30% like in app stores.

It is 50%. Tiktok takes half of every donation. It takes advantage of underage girls, pimps them out and dangles their sexuality in front of the viewers, and skins them for half of everything they get.

YUMad3• 7 years ago

Adding some examples of quality tiktok content:

https://i.4cdn.org/wsg/1552272052005.webm

https://i.4cdn.org/wsg/1551552722398.webm

https://i.4cdn.org/wsg/1551386495506.webm

AllegedAlec2• 7 years ago

Where are the Ricardo remixes though?

hackbeer1• 7 years ago

Hit or Miss!

SimpleMinds• 7 years ago

I have similar experience as other commenters, tried TikTok, found it very boring and silly. But then I tried the original, Chinese version (Douyin) and the quality of the content there is so much better than TikTok.

You can actually see a lot of gifs right now on reddit being taken straight from Douyin because that's where cool/fun stuff is being created.

To compare with Vine - by not having time limit, I was able to see the 30sec video of how too cook one of the Chinese dishes, or 1 minute video of a metal welder creating one of his metal sculptures.

It's extremly addictive I think, because content might be realy short or quite-but-not-too long.

I'm trying to say in a roundabout way that Douyin content is miles ahead of TikTok content. I haven't seen too much of the TikTok's girls seeking attention content issue.

ilaksh2• 7 years ago

If that's the case then it's an evolution of video content and a totally different story than the creepy teenagers stuff. Because one of the big advantages of YouTube is that the content is sort of compressed. There is less filler content like a TV show would need to complete a time slot. The content is more information-dense. These apps take that up a notch or two.

That doesn't necessarily work for everything but for many things cutting out the fat is going to deliver more information in a shorter time.

Grue3• 7 years ago

Just like Vine... and Snapchat... and MySpace... Who would've thought people grow out of apps targeted at young people.

How TikTok Is Rewriting the World

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