Mark Zuckerberg misunderstands the threat of TikTok

https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/01/instagram-vs-tiktok/

113 101 7 years ago

Udo• 7 years ago

"TikTok isn’t about you or what you’re doing. It’s about entertaining your audience. It’s not spontaneous chronicling of your real life. It’s about inventing characters, dressing up as someone else, and acting out jokes. It’s not about privacy and friends, but strutting on the world stage. And it’s not about originality — the heart of Instagram. TikTok is about remixing culture"

This does not fit in with FB's goals and strategy. Zuckerberg may not grasp it, but even if he does, it's unclear how this could be implemented inside a framework that is 100% centered on a user's profile and real-life persona.

puranjay2• 7 years ago

The "millennial" social networks were all about sharing

The Gen-Z social networks will be all about creation

Zuckerberg does not have a finger in this pie and that should be an alarming sign for any Facebook share holders.

mschuster912• 7 years ago

Zuckerberg does not have a finger in this pie and that should be an alarming sign for any Facebook share holders.

Why? Facebook can wait until one proves to be the winner and buy them out. Or, in case the target is unwilling to be taken over (like Snapchat was), Facebook simply integrates their model into FB/Instagram, exposes it to billions of people at once and crushes the target.

puranjay2• 7 years ago

I'm not sure they can truly afford it at TikTok's current valuation. TikTok's maker, ByteDance, also has a "revenue moat" in the form of their news app.

The time to buy TikTok was three years and 500M users ago.

logicchains2• 7 years ago

ByteDance is valued at over $80 billion, if the Chinese government would even allow the purchase. They've also invested a helluva lot of machine learning resources into building a platform that's hard to copy.

raverbashing• 7 years ago

Facebook simply integrates their model into FB/Instagram

FB got away with it because Vine and Snap had really awful UX.

I don't remember an app that lasted less time on my phone than Vine, it's almost like it was made exclusively for people glued on their phone all day. Sound on by default? REALLY?

dta3456• 7 years ago

Facebook can wait until one proves to be the winner and buy them out

ByteDance is one of the most valuable unicorns in the world, I can't see that ever happening.

michaelt• 7 years ago

Facebook can wait until one proves to be the winner and buy them out.

Isn't it Chinese government policy not to block such transactions?

Google didn't buy Baidu, and Ebay didn't buy AliExpress, and Paypal didn't buy WeChat Pay.

unixhero• 7 years ago

So Reddit is essentially a millennial social network?... And Hacker News too?

Gee. I feel old now. Real kick in the face. ;)

api2• 7 years ago

Would mean GitHub is a Gen Z social network, so don't feel too old.

paganel• 7 years ago

Reddit and HN also appealed to us people born in the late ‘70s - early ‘80s whom I wouldn’t call millennials (I’m born in 1980 and I definitely do not consider myself a millennial). We are an interesting generation, we joined the workforce a little after the dot-com crash but before the 2008 financial crisis and especially before all this social media crazyness.

echelon• 7 years ago

Moving off topic a bit: almost every generation is known by a non-alphabetic name, except for Generation X, which never received its own label.

  - Lost Generation (1883 - 1900 cohort, extinct as of 2018)
  - Greatest Generation (1901 - 1927, WWII generation)
  - Silent Generation (1928 - 1945, McCarthy, Korean war, civil rights)
  - Baby boomers (1946 - 1964, post-war, Vietnam War, hippies)
  - Generation X (1965 - 1980)
  - Millennials (1981 - 1996, formerly known as Generation Y)
  - Generation Z (1997 - early-2000s)

Some are starting to call Generation Z "Post-Millennial", but I think they'll get their own label in due time. Something reflexive of the time in which they grew up, which is something we probably won't be able to call out just yet.

"iGeneration" is a label that gets tossed around occasionally, but it's so meh.

In the meantime, I've been calling them Zoomers or Zoomies :P

TheSoftwareGuy• 7 years ago

I'd like to add that before the term "Millennial" was invented, Gen-Y were sometimes referred to as echo-boomers. This is because if you look at a graph of births/year you see a big spike for the baby boomers, and later you see another smaller but still noticeable spike when they start having kids. Hence, echo-boomers

jfengel• 7 years ago

"X" really is the name of Generation X. It was a response to the feeling of being lost and unnoticed after the attention paid to baby boomers. Some of that was just youthful disaffectation: "oh, look, all of the good jobs are filled by older people who don't understand me, and my culture isn't as cool as the classics they grew up with". And some is the lack of a big defining event (basically, war) that focused culture on some specific thing.

There was no Generation W. Only the Baby Boom (starting in 1944 and going on a decade or so) was an actual demographic event, followed by a smaller "baby bust" and an even smaller "baby boom echo" that corresponds vaguely to GenX. Subsequent "generations" are pretty much exclusively in the minds of marketers and social media.

So to the degree that Generation X is a notion worthy of a name, "X" is the name they gave themselves, following Douglas Coupland's book, which didn't coin the term but attracted a lot of attention. The book was mostly about dotcom culture, and "dotcom" would be a better name for it since that was the defining event of that generation (if it had one at all).

"Z" is now entering the same phase: graduating into the world of work, hating entry-level jobs, and not yet having its big cultural moment. If there is one at all.

Konnstann• 7 years ago

Zoomers sdoes to be the popular term nowadays.

parliament322• 7 years ago

Zoomers is definitely the right term there.

qasimzafar• 7 years ago

Tik Tok is almost the new Vine, but less restrictive and more engaging. The biggest assumption the article makes is that even in case Facebook were to try to buy out creators for Lasso, making new content is hard work and Tik Tok creators have spend hours and hours putting together the followings that they have.

It's not easy to convince such passionate and fan-driven folk with built audiences to switch, it's almost as if Vimeo started trying to pay YouTubers to switch to Vimeo.

mschuster912• 7 years ago

Tik Tok is almost the new Vine, but less restrictive and more engaging.

Less restrictive? Just look at what they do to LGBT content: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/26/tiktoks-l...

Additionally, it's Chinese and thus likely to be in the target list of economic sanctions. For once, something good could result out of the cringefest that is the US-China trade war.

pysxul• 7 years ago

How is that any different from twitter enforcing it the other way around?

josephpmay• 7 years ago

I use Tik Tok every day and like a good percentage of the content it shows me I’d consider “gay.” They may have restricted LGBT content in the past, but they definitely don’t now.

chrisjc• 7 years ago

I smell an opportunity for Facebook. Appeal to the disenfranchised and oppressed.

hesk• 7 years ago

If TikTok is the new Vine than who is the next David Dobrik?

delfinom• 7 years ago

The biggest assumption the article makes is that even in case Facebook were to try to buy out creators for Lasso,

The name alone means nobody will use it. It's not catchey at all. It sounds more of a clothing store or something.

shostack• 7 years ago

How did TikTok solve the two sided marketplace problem and build critical mass?

bryan_w• 7 years ago

A metric butt-ton of advertising on FB and Google

camillomiller2• 7 years ago

Right, to counter that they should allow self-made child pornography on Facebook. (If you’ve ever seen popular TikTok videos, you know what I mean)

swiley• 7 years ago

I was on tiktok for a couple months and never saw anything like that! Lots of memes and some really creative stuff with music and sketching but absolutely nothing pornographic.

changoplatanero• 7 years ago

tiktok feed will show you what it thinks you want to see more of based on your past behavior. It looks like you and the parent commenter have different viewing habits!

camillomiller2• 7 years ago

A 16 years old who dances half naked to a popular song and rakes in millions of views, to me is wrong. Especially on a platform where you don’t need to register to watch the content. I’ve never been on tik tok, just saw videos reposted on Reddit

mrtksn• 7 years ago

I'm not sure that anyone understands it, really.

In Turkey TikTok people and Instagram/Twitter people cater to completely separate demographics[from all ages]. People in Instagram/Twitter world would be exposed to funny TikTok videos quite often through Instagram/Twitter celebrities but TikTok is viewed as the place where "rednecks do cringy things that are sometimes funny but I don't want to be associated with".

BBC Turkish did a short documentary[0] on Turkish TikTok celebrities, they were talking about their desire(but a failure) to migrate their fanbase to YouTube since the monetisation was not good enough on TikTok. They portrayed TikTok as a place for everyday people, unlike other places like Instagram where apparently everyone lives a glamorous life.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FURmgQJYHY

mtgx• 7 years ago

Don't forget FB was once only for college students. And now grandparents and 2 year olds are on it (unfortunately). Even Reddit was once only for a very specific audience. Now it's in top 5 most visited sites in the US.

I think Zuck understands the threat better than most. And this is precisely why the government should not allow him to buy anymore of these competitors, no matter how early in their startup life. No monopoly should be allowed to buy any competition at whatever level.

If they want to compete, they should build their own solutions and compete on merit. They should certainly have all the money and clout they need for that (it's just that often they completely misunderstand the "new markets", but that's their own leadership problem and nobody owns them anything so that they remain a monopoly).

I certainly wish Instagram and WhatsApp didn't belong to FB or any of the Big Tech right now.

erdemozg• 7 years ago

If one told me beforehand that those people from conservative background would do such things on a video and share it with the rest of the world, I'd say you have no idea about Turkish culture. But now I say I had no idea about Turkish culture and what those people are capable of. I literally get shocked every time I watch a tiktok compilation video. I wonder if those are the same people I see in the street everyday.

ethbro• 7 years ago

As the saying goes, 'everyone has a little red under their collar.'

(In the abstracted, skin-tone neutral sense)

tyingq• 7 years ago

I'm curious how well he understands the trend with Facebook. Anecdotal, but all the young people I know via my kids either don't use FB at all, or only maintain an account to share things with their "old" relatives.

His other platforms don't seem to have the same level of deep data collection and manipulation capability FB does.

peteretep• 7 years ago

I mean, reading his comments, it sounds like he has a pretty good handle on it? I'm not sure the article makes the point its headline is promising here.

sergioj972• 7 years ago

I personally found that the things the article's author argues that Zuckerberg doesn't understand are being acknowledged and discussed by Zuckerberg itself in the leaked comments.

underwater3• 7 years ago

I doubt Zuck is underestimating TikTok. He has spent a 13 years living and breathing social media, has surrounded himself by smart people, has access to masses of data others don't, and has shown a willingness to admit making mistakes.

Taking his Q&A responses at face value is a mistake. There is a huge element of PR in his response. He is undoubtedly very aware that anything he says has a decent chance of being leaked to the press.

nickthegreek2• 7 years ago

His concerns should be that he cant buy TikTok and the facebook brand name is toxic to the youth. TikTok is mostly youth.

cptskippy3• 7 years ago

Facebook is toxic to adults to, it's like AT&T or Comcast. Everyone who uses it hates it and can't find a suitable replacement.

_pmf_• 7 years ago

Why can't he buy it and why can't he buy it and leave it under the existing brand?

karmakaze• 7 years ago

It's not so much the toxic aspect but if given a choice why would yonger generations be on the same platforms/networks as their parents/grandparents? Instagram is set to be facebook2 and so on generationally.

espadrine• 7 years ago

Mark Zuckerberg’s answer to TikTok is similar to that for Snapchat. After he failed to convince Evan Spiegel to sell, his company released Poke[0] in 2012, an app that failed to reach its competitor’s success and got shut down in 2014[1].

[0] https://www.vox.com/2018/2/17/17022586/facebook-snapchat-pok...

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/9/5700732/facebook-poke-is-d...

WillPostForFood• 7 years ago

Facebook also responded to Snapchat by copying their most compelling features and integrating them into Instagram. It has been highly effective at taking the wind out of Snapchat’s sails. Facebook can easily afford to attack threats in a multitude of ways.

meerita• 7 years ago

It's true that he spent his life doing this, but that doesn't mean he's god knows everything person. Truth is, during history, most leaders lost track of certain aspects, we can cite Microsoft, Apple and other bigger companies. Just because he built FB doesn't mean he understands TikTok.

sharemywin2• 7 years ago

The same could be said for Xerox, Kodak, Apple, Blackberry, IBM, Microsoft, Google, etc.

Yet each one got their lunch ate in the next trend.

brennebeck• 7 years ago

I don’t really think Apple, Google, or Microsoft fit in that set...

patagurbon2• 7 years ago

Apple and MSFT do not belong in that list at all. Google remains to be seen, but they’re doing just fine. Apple has demonstrated time and again the ability to innovate in the hardware space, even if you find their products overpriced like I do. And MSFT has so many different extremely successful products they’re totally unkillable.

underwater3• 7 years ago

A lot of large companies capture a market and then slowly switch to defending the status quo while the world changes around them.

I don't believe that Facebook is at that point yet. If they were they would have missed the switch to mobile, struggled against Google+, lost to Snap, etc.

OrgNet• 7 years ago

[...] and has shown a willingness to admit making mistakes

lol, we must live in a different world.

underwater3• 7 years ago

He dumped 20 billion dollars into WhatsApp, a company with a dozen employees, when Facebook already had a successful messaging app. That's an astounding lack of sentimentality.

CPLX• 7 years ago

Every social network ends up having somewhat of an emotional tone as well that springs up out of its users as an emergent property.

Like clearly Tumblr and Blogger and Twitter, despite being structurally not that different from each other, have different cultures.

What I’ve found interesting about TikTok is that the culture seems so joyful. Lots of really happy people sharing in a way that actually makes you feel some cohesion with other people.

People checking in from the South, or Georgia or Wisconsin, or the city or country, etc. it’s sort of the opposite of the constant divisiveness you feel browsing Twitter or Reddit. Or the opposite the little cultural bubble Facebook puts you in.

I wasn’t aware the internet could still do that. I think that might prove to have interesting implications.

ghaff• 7 years ago

Emergent properties is a good way of putting things. A lot of these things seems to play out in an at least somewhat chaotic and difficult to predict way. Remember Orcut, which effectively ended up as Google's Brazilian social network.

Sometimes rules and other deliberate structures guide the evolution but it's often small things that aren't obvious up front.

And, of course, very different things can evolve within the same social network. Lots of people don't care about monetization on YouTube. For others, it's what YouTube exists for from their personal perspective.

eclipsetheworld• 7 years ago

My personal Instagram vs TikTok experience can be summarized in three points.

(i) TikTok's content is more engaging (ii) Instagram's content could be easily recreated on TikTok (iii) TikTok's explore feed is addictive

(i) TikTok videos are high-definition, fluid videos with catchy music. TikTok's compression algorithm almost seems lossless since videos are much more crisp than on Instagram/Facebook. I even believe they are upsampling videos from 30fps to 60fps (although this is just a personal observation and may be wrong). The catchy music is probably self-explanatory.

(ii) Think of typical Instagram content: an influencer posing or a travel snapshot. Now imagine the same content as short, crisp, and fluid videos with engaging music. Instagram content creators could easily recreate their content on TikTok in a more engaging way.

(iii) Upon opening the app you are shown the explore feed. You are shown a single TikTok video in fullscreen and you can swipe up to load the next video. The TikTok app seems to preload the next 5 videos which in practice means that content is always instantly available. The algorithm is quite quick in learning what content you like to see.

I think this quote sums up my thoughts quite nicely: "When I was a product manager at Facebook and Instagram, building a true content-first social network was the holy grail. We never figured it out. Yet somehow TikTok has cracked the nut and leapfrogged everyone else." — Eric Bahn, General Partner at Hustle Fund & Ex Instagram Product Manager

giancarlostoro• 7 years ago

(i) TikTok videos are high-definition, fluid videos with catchy music. TikTok's compression algorithm almost seems lossless since videos are much more crisp than on Instagram/Facebook. I even believe they are upsampling videos from 30fps to 60fps (although this is just a personal observation and may be wrong). The catchy music is probably self-explanatory.

This is something I didn't think about: do they play video by itself and sync the audio to the video? They could then cache the audio once, and replay for all similar videos.

parliament322• 7 years ago

There are definitely videos with the exact same soundtrack so it makes sense for them to cache the audio stream.

xiaolingxiao• 7 years ago

What does a content first social network mean? What’s the opposite of content first?

Mathnerd314• 7 years ago

Connection-first, apparently: https://andrewchen.co/social-products-win-with-utility-not-i...

api2• 7 years ago

TikTok seems controlled by a company controlled by the Chinese government (Bytedance), so China's intelligence agencies can now vacuum up infinite cringey videos of people doing silly things. Quick someone tell the DOD there's a database of silly videos gap between the US and China!

As I've said many times: just move all those old cyberpunk novels to the nonfiction section.

AFascistWorld• 7 years ago

UGC platforms seem to inevitablly ditch grassroots in the end, how many grassroots do you see on youtube now?

I think the fast nature of Tiktok is driving it much faster to that same end, I've seen plenty of widespread Tiktok fake videos that were created with the sole purpose of getting the most views, like those fix things with ramen pack and glue.

katzgrau• 7 years ago

IMO, Facebook's greatest achievement was getting my parent's and grandparent's generation on social media. You know, the people with disposable income that attract a wide range of advertisers.

Ten years ago I thought it was impossible. Any social media network that can't achieve that, including Snap, is probably counting its days. Facebook also has an absurd amount of user and interest data.

I always thought those who considered Snap to be a real threat (and now TikTok) to be ignoring the underlying revenue growth vehicles of those companies.

dilyevsky• 7 years ago

Sounds more like apple’s and google’s (android) achievement.

djohnston• 7 years ago

yes, the success story that is google+

remeq• 7 years ago

doh, never heard of TikTok, just googled it and their logo is giving me a serious headache

flywithdolp• 7 years ago

TikTok is the best worst social media out there

mattmaroon• 7 years ago

TikTok will be gone in like 3 years right?

thrower123• 7 years ago

Almost certainly. It happens like clockwork that there's a new hip social media thingy for the 13-22 set, almost every year. A lot of them fizzle out at die with barely a whisper. A lot of them get acquihired for piles of money beyond their value, and then stagnate.

Almost none of them cross the divide and become more widely popular.

disconcision• 7 years ago

what is 'the divide' in this sense? tiktok is about on par with tumblr for active users

Fjolsvith• 7 years ago

I disagree. I'm not a social media user, and yet I love TikTok, and have even posted a video there. I like to view it for about 15 minutes right before falling asleep. My wife and I get a lot of laughs out of the videos together.

Abishek_Muthian• 7 years ago

That's the thing with limited attention, instant gratification economy.

Anyone who can minimize the attention span further, turn blind eye to abuse of children in their platform (at-least initially till uproar) by targeting Asian countries where enforcement of laws are questionable and 60% of world population live; can grow at exponential rate i.e. till another platform which reduces attention span further.

This is a plague, these limited attention gratification is not limited to these platforms themselves and are being exploited successfully for pushing misinformation by various nefarious elements including but not limited to political parties.

mindgam3• 7 years ago

From the conclusion:

If Zuckerberg... doesn’t decisively move to challenge TikTok soon... we could see our interest data, faces, and attention forfeited to an app that while delightful to use, heralds Chinese political values at odds with our own.

I'm usually a fan of Josh Constine's analysis of Facebook, but positioning Facebook as a defender of American political values is a bit much. If the growth-at-all-costs company that led us to social media dystopia is our best defense against Chinese political values, we are well and truly fucked.

Mark Zuckerberg misunderstands the threat of TikTok

Related Stories