TikTok hits 1.5B downloads, outperforming Instagram • Hacker News Board

Re: TikTok hits 1.5B downloads, outperforming Instagram

#121

Post by merpnderp » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 5:07 PM UTC

logicchains wrote: post #70

komali2 wrote: post #51

Aight, conspiracy theory time. I'm becoming concerned about PRC influence in my country (USA). From my perspective the PRC (government) is blatantly evil, and happily engaging in cultural warfare, and nobody seems to be fighting back. I see absurd astroturfing and shilling on social media here (Reddit, Twitter, Facebook). It's always obvious - whereas a genuine criticizer of the Hong Kong protestors might ask about v…

The way I see it, the Chinese government doesn't care what you do as long as you don't challenge it. The US on the other hand seems intent on enforcing its whims everywhere on the globe it can. War on terror, war on drugs, war on encryption, war on financial privacy, war on intellectual property infringement. To quote CS Lewis: "It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. Th…

"...as long as you don't challenge it."

Challenge it on what? Currency manipulation? Unfair trade practices? Influencing elections? Going against every international body and established rule, and building island military bases to seize new ocean territory from its neighbors? Building concentration camps to imprison millions of minorities who have committed no crime? Propping up N. Korea to use its instability to further Chinese international negotiations?

So if China isn't challenged on any anything of importance, it doesn't care what you do? All countries do bad things and they should all be challenged on it. Why would China be different?

Re: TikTok hits 1.5B downloads, outperforming Instagram

#122

Post by onlyrealcuzzo » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 5:10 PM UTC

chrshawkes wrote: post #101

trophycase wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably not fake. My teenage sister has gone from "TikTok is so cringey" a few months ago to "I actually kind of like it". It's now socially acceptable to use so it's in the clear. I saw someone using it on the airplane last week too.

I have children, all the children are using it. The other day two famous TikTokers we're spotted in a Northern VA mall and it was a pretty big deal. It's not fake.

Just because a lot of kids are using it doesn't mean it has 1.2Bn downloads. That's a lot of downloads.

Gmail is 10 years old, for context, and it's ubiquitous for basically the entire population, and it has barely 4 times that. When you account for the fact that most Gmail users have gone through several phones and downloaded Gmail several times, it seems pretty suspicious that an app only for kids has 1.2Bn downloads -- when it's possible close to the entire Android mobile users that use Gmail -- which comes pre-installed on like ~60% of phones in the world.

I'm pretty sure these numbers do not include the Chinese market at all, since they don't have Google Play Services. A lot of Tiktok's users are supposed to be in China.

If these numbers are supposed to include Chinese users, I'd take that with a double grain of salt. For the same auditing reasons, we have no reason to trust any download counts that come from a Chinese company.

If these are supposed to be only iPhone numbers (which AFAIK include Chinese downloads), that's SUBSTANTIALLY more suspicious. There definitely aren't ~750Mn kids with iPhones. And the numbers that would imply in total are completely unbelievable.

At a previous company, we did a marketing campaign with TikTok. They claimed that more than 65% of their users are under 25.

Re: TikTok hits 1.5B downloads, outperforming Instagram

#123

Post by TremendousJudge » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 5:11 PM UTC

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #40

bransonf wrote: post #30

What amazes me is that Tik-Tok fills the void created when Twitter killed vine. Given the popularity of Vine, and the outrage when Twitter killed it, I have no idea why they thought it was a good move. I’m bullish on Tik-Tok because I think it’s the next logical evolution of social media (and totally captures the Vine fan base which was pretty big to begin with) First there was text, both Facebook and Twitter. Then i…

> First there was text, both Facebook and Twitter. Then images with instagram. Now people want videos that they can consume in short bits of time en mass. What you are describing is the continued fall to smaller and smaller bits of stimulation and information. I’m worried about the consequences of this on the human mind and humanity in general. Our tech is gradually eroding our ability to focus on anything for more t…

>Our tech is gradually eroding our ability to focus on anything for more than a few seconds.

real quotes from late 19th/early 20th century: https://xkcd.com/1227/

>With the advent of cheap newspapers and superior means of locomotion... The dreamy quiet old days are over... For men now live think and work at express speed. They have their Mercury or Post laid on their breakfast table in the early morning, and if they are too hurried to snatch from it the news during that meal, they carry it off, to be sulkily read as they travel ... leaving them no time to talk with the friend who may share the compartment with them... The hurry and bustle of modern life ... lacks the quiet and repose of the period when our forefathers, the day's work done, took their ease...

>So much is exhibited to the eye that nothing is left to the imagination. It sometimes seems almost possible that the modern world might be choked by its own riches, and human faculty dwindle away amid the million inventions that have been introduced to render its exercise unnecessary.

Re: TikTok hits 1.5B downloads, outperforming Instagram

#124

Post by sjilo » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 5:12 PM UTC

devy wrote: post #103

The biggest headline should be this: Essentially, TikTok is the only app in the top five that isn't owned by Facebook. Do you trust Facebook to influence your children with toxic content and propaganda in the top 5 app downloads all owned by Facebook? I don't.

Do you trust the Chinese government?

Re: TikTok hits 1.5B downloads, outperforming Instagram

#125

Post by natalyarostova » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 5:17 PM UTC

logicchains wrote: post #70

komali2 wrote: post #51

Aight, conspiracy theory time. I'm becoming concerned about PRC influence in my country (USA). From my perspective the PRC (government) is blatantly evil, and happily engaging in cultural warfare, and nobody seems to be fighting back. I see absurd astroturfing and shilling on social media here (Reddit, Twitter, Facebook). It's always obvious - whereas a genuine criticizer of the Hong Kong protestors might ask about v…

The way I see it, the Chinese government doesn't care what you do as long as you don't challenge it. The US on the other hand seems intent on enforcing its whims everywhere on the globe it can. War on terror, war on drugs, war on encryption, war on financial privacy, war on intellectual property infringement. To quote CS Lewis: "It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. Th…

Would you rather live under a robber baron than in the US? What does this look like to you? Who is the robber baron? How does he treat you?

Re: TikTok hits 1.5B downloads, outperforming Instagram

#126

Post by simmanian » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 5:18 PM UTC

komali2 wrote: post #51

Aight, conspiracy theory time. I'm becoming concerned about PRC influence in my country (USA). From my perspective the PRC (government) is blatantly evil, and happily engaging in cultural warfare, and nobody seems to be fighting back. I see absurd astroturfing and shilling on social media here (Reddit, Twitter, Facebook). It's always obvious - whereas a genuine criticizer of the Hong Kong protestors might ask about v…

I had been worried about the Chinese influence in America for a while in the past, but recently came to the conclusion that the American value system is not at risk of being taken over by the Chinese value system. The American system pushes forward individual freedom, humanism, liberalism, capitalism -- things that transcend the boundaries of race, borders, etc. I would argue these values were quickly adopted by many cultures because they provide a lot of value in today's market driven world.

In comparison, what the PRC offers is very specific to China. The government wants to see China grow strong and lead the world. They may or may not get there, but these values offer little value to the rest of the world, especially those that have already adopted the liberal values.

Re: TikTok hits 1.5B downloads, outperforming Instagram

#127

Post by dv_dt » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 5:18 PM UTC

logicchains wrote: post #70

komali2 wrote: post #51

Aight, conspiracy theory time. I'm becoming concerned about PRC influence in my country (USA). From my perspective the PRC (government) is blatantly evil, and happily engaging in cultural warfare, and nobody seems to be fighting back. I see absurd astroturfing and shilling on social media here (Reddit, Twitter, Facebook). It's always obvious - whereas a genuine criticizer of the Hong Kong protestors might ask about v…

The way I see it, the Chinese government doesn't care what you do as long as you don't challenge it. The US on the other hand seems intent on enforcing its whims everywhere on the globe it can. War on terror, war on drugs, war on encryption, war on financial privacy, war on intellectual property infringement. To quote CS Lewis: "It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. Th…

I think we can criticize both the Chinese Govt as well as our own government. For instance, China sees no holdback from imprisoning and killing anyone on the thinnest of pretenses, it's basically wielding ultimate authoritarian power to ruin or end lives. On the other hand, the US actually wields a similar authoritarian imprisonment power much more frequently than China, actually more than almost any nation in the world - 10x more than other enlightened western nations, and the same or more than many repressive nations going by percentages of population in prison. The US justifications for that many in prison are just as weak a pretense as the Chinese justifications we just accept them more readily.

Wether it's an oligarchy of party elite, or oligarchy of robber barons pulling the strings makes little difference to the lives ruined.

Re: TikTok hits 1.5B downloads, outperforming Instagram

#128

Post by thiagomgd » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 5:21 PM UTC

I tried it a month ago, and while it was fun, I had to uninstall because there's NO WAY to disable push notifications for new posts, profile suggestions, etc...

Re: TikTok hits 1.5B downloads, outperforming Instagram

#129

Post by Invictus0 » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 5:22 PM UTC

TremendousJudge wrote: post #123

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First there was text, both Facebook and Twitter. Then images with instagram. Now people want videos that they can consume in short bits of time en mass. What you are describing is the continued fall to smaller and smaller bits of stimulation and information. I’m worried about the consequences of this on the human mind and humanity in general. Our tech is gradually eroding our ability to focus on anything for more t…

>Our tech is gradually eroding our ability to focus on anything for more than a few seconds. real quotes from late 19th/early 20th century: https://xkcd.com/1227/ >With the advent of cheap newspapers and superior means of locomotion... The dreamy quiet old days are over... For men now live think and work at express speed. They have their Mercury or Post laid on their breakfast table in the early morning, and if they…

I know people that cannot go 60 seconds without picking up their phone, with no purpose except to check for notifications that aren't there and then put it back down. Reposting a list of quotes from the past has no bearing on the present reality where people are really struggling to focus.

Re: TikTok hits 1.5B downloads, outperforming Instagram

#130

Post by hervature » Tue, Nov 19, 2019, 5:22 PM UTC

mgbmtl wrote: post #73

whatshisface wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the issues that America is trying to push in Europe?

As a Canadian, random examples: Indifference to violence, hypocrisy on nudity, monetizing privacy (no respect for privacy), monetizing medical care. (I don't mean to start a flame war, but they are topics where EU and Canada tend to disagree with major US trends)

As a fellow Canadian can you expand on this?

Canada has been involved in every war that the US has been in my lifetime (born in 1993). Don't know what you mean on hypocrisy on nudity, but I only became comfortable with it when I visited Scandinavia when I was 22; seems like Canada has a similar issue.

I'll maybe give you medical care, but this is an incredibly complex topic. To think that public health care isn't monetized is a naïve point of view.

Somehow, the only thing that the Canadian government has done differently than the US is that it has convinced its people that it is not the US. That's my honest opinion.