TikTok hits 1.5B downloads, outperforming Instagram

My impression is that it is a quick, simple, but extremely effective medium for artistic expression.

In a sense it is very pure; it is not about anything specific and, more importantly, it is not about showing a fake, happy, successful version of yourself.

While I am too old to participate in it, as a medium it looks more healthy in term of living with your online persona (compared to insta-models and travel vlogging).

> It's cool but it's not what's going to create a account on it.

The reason to create an account would be not to watch videos but to make videos. In that tiktok feels a bit like a teenager version of a twitter, youtube chimera.

The parent company is profitable now (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/30/tiktok-owner-bytedances-firs...).

Facebook’s privacy faux pas will be nothing compared to a company who’s government can request any of users data (Chinese or not) with zero oversight.

We are in for a wild ride as major Chinese companies start building successful global companies.

From a fraud perspective, it would be extremely cheap to fake downloads.

Since Chinese companies aren't audited the same way US companies are, yet they can still list on exchanges, having some outside "probable" growth metric gives more credibility to their internal numbers.

I'm not saying it's all fake. I'm just saying it wouldn't take very much resources to fake this, and ByteDance has the resources, and we don't really audit them, so I'd gladly miss out on this growth opportunity, but that's just me.

Astroturfed or not TikTok has excellent creators (for now anyway I'm sure it will be ruined as it becomes more popular if history teaches us anything about fads). Just go watch a TikTok compilation on YouTube if you want to get the best parts of it without downloading the app. It's easy to burn 1-2 hours mindlessly watching absurd videos.

I really shouldn't be saying this because I'm not a big fan of Facebook, but if someone at FB HQ is racking their brain for a solution to destroy TikTok it is very very easy. Do what you did to destroy your own product. Create an influx of lame people to produce content for it. When the "For You" page of TikTok is just un-ironic minion memes and Karen levels of "Live, Love, Laugh" people won't use it much longer.