Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitter, TikTok Have Held Preliminary Talks About Possible Combination

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 107 posts

Re: Twitter, TikTok Have Held Preliminary Talks About Possible Combination

#41

Post by tempsy »

someperson wrote: post #36
tempsy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my theory is that their current head of product, who was the founder of Periscope which Twitter bought pre-launch, made the argument for Live Video (his app) over Vine at that time when Live streaming eg Meerkat/Periscope looked to be the "next big thing" in social media (which it never became). Twitter had to choose one video strategy and went with live because of Periscope and it ended up being the wrong decision.

Twitter in 2016 was bleeding money. In that financial situation, offloading a product that was losing $10 million/month without an immediate path to profitability was a reasonable decision. The question is why a cash rich Silicon Valley company didn't buy Vine for pennies on the dollar. It could have been Google. It could have been Apple. It could have been Microsoft. It could have been Facebook. Personally, I think…

ok - so now that they are in a better cash position (or at least in an environment flush with cash that tolerates money losing operations) what's $10M/month in losses?

Re: Twitter, TikTok Have Held Preliminary Talks About Possible Combination

#42

Post by tempsy »

holler wrote: post #38
tempsy wrote: post #23

Why doesn't Twitter just resurrect Vine? They literally have all the source code.

The founder of Vine already launched a new short-form video app similar to TikTok called Byte...

Twitter has the reach though, especially if they launch it similarly to Instagram and just embed it into their existing app vs a standalone product.

Re: Twitter, TikTok Have Held Preliminary Talks About Possible Combination

#43

Post by lilyball »

someperson wrote: post #28

It's worth constantly re-iterating that Vine [1] was shutdown by Twitter in 2017 back when Twitter was losing a lot of cash. It was available for any tech company to purchase for pennies on the dollar and was losing $10 million/month to run [2]. Vine was very popular and a lot of people were very disappointed when it was shutdown. It predated TikTok and Musical.ly and certainly had the vast majority of users for shor…

> adding a news feed algorithm to keep up with a competitor would not have been that hard

I'm not convinced this is true. TikTok's algorithmic "For You Page" is astonishingly good. Somehow TikTok manages to zero in on stuff relevant to users extremely quickly, and without relying on spamming a lot of general interest popular content. I created a TikTok account recently and literally within minutes I was getting an extremely personalized FYP (For You Page) without even following anyone. If my wife and I compare our FYPs we'll find virtually no overlap (possibly a few cat videos but that's it). I've never seen anyone else do an algorithmic feed even half as good as this. Everyone else seems to rely on just spamming you with general-interest popular videos and hope you'll find enough people to follow to fill out the feed yourself. TikTok's FYP isn't even driven by follows, that's a separate feed.

Re: Twitter, TikTok Have Held Preliminary Talks About Possible Combination

#45

Post by rel2thr »

I don’t get how twitter and msft could buy just the US operations of a company like tiktok... like do the developers and PMs still work in China and then twitter just helps maintain the servers. Or does the app diverge into 2 apps at that point with 2 separate dev teams?

Re: Twitter, TikTok Have Held Preliminary Talks About Possible Combination

#46

Post by someperson »

lilyball wrote: post #43
someperson wrote: post #28

It's worth constantly re-iterating that Vine [1] was shutdown by Twitter in 2017 back when Twitter was losing a lot of cash. It was available for any tech company to purchase for pennies on the dollar and was losing $10 million/month to run [2]. Vine was very popular and a lot of people were very disappointed when it was shutdown. It predated TikTok and Musical.ly and certainly had the vast majority of users for shor…

> adding a news feed algorithm to keep up with a competitor would not have been that hard I'm not convinced this is true. TikTok's algorithmic "For You Page" is astonishingly good. Somehow TikTok manages to zero in on stuff relevant to users extremely quickly, and without relying on spamming a lot of general interest popular content. I created a TikTok account recently and literally within minutes I was getting an ex…

Try opening YouTube in an incognito tab and start watching a few videos (on say, cooking). You'll notice the recommended videos on the homepage gets very accurate very fast.

The algorithms behind recommendation engines are well understood. Companies can and do invest huge amounts into making their algorithms better and it yes, it definitely takes a lot of effort to tweak and refine the algorithm to make the overall experience addictive and relevant.

But the seemingly widely held idea that TikTok builds better recommendation algorithms than other companies (including Facebook's News Feed) doesn't seem to stand up to scrutiny.

Re: Twitter, TikTok Have Held Preliminary Talks About Possible Combination

#47

Post by dane-pgp »

searchableguy wrote: post #33
whoevercares wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=you%20can%20...

> Translated from Chinglish. aka If you can do it then you should go up and do it. It's used against people who criticize others' work, especially when the criticizer it not that much better. Often followed by "no can no BB", which means "if you can't do it then don't even criticize it".

For those still wondering, 'In Pekingese, "BB" apparently means "nag; complain"' according to:

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=12358

Re: Twitter, TikTok Have Held Preliminary Talks About Possible Combination

#48

Post by sjg007 »

someperson wrote: post #36
tempsy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my theory is that their current head of product, who was the founder of Periscope which Twitter bought pre-launch, made the argument for Live Video (his app) over Vine at that time when Live streaming eg Meerkat/Periscope looked to be the "next big thing" in social media (which it never became). Twitter had to choose one video strategy and went with live because of Periscope and it ended up being the wrong decision.

Twitter in 2016 was bleeding money. In that financial situation, offloading a product that was losing $10 million/month without an immediate path to profitability was a reasonable decision. The question is why a cash rich Silicon Valley company didn't buy Vine for pennies on the dollar. It could have been Google. It could have been Apple. It could have been Microsoft. It could have been Facebook. Personally, I think…

Well nobody saw the opportunity..

Re: Twitter, TikTok Have Held Preliminary Talks About Possible Combination

#49

Post by m3kw9 »

someperson wrote: post #28

It's worth constantly re-iterating that Vine [1] was shutdown by Twitter in 2017 back when Twitter was losing a lot of cash. It was available for any tech company to purchase for pennies on the dollar and was losing $10 million/month to run [2]. Vine was very popular and a lot of people were very disappointed when it was shutdown. It predated TikTok and Musical.ly and certainly had the vast majority of users for shor…

If you remember, vine needed you to select, like all other Content serving apps, what you like and it tries to show you interesting stuff. Tiktok by passed that step like magic and got the user locked in fast

Re: Twitter, TikTok Have Held Preliminary Talks About Possible Combination

#50

Post by babesh »

mantap wrote: post #37
babesh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vine wasn’t designed right. TikTok is much better designed in terms of content surfacing and content creation.

I don't agree with this at all. It was much easier to find good content on vine because vines spread organically. TikTok rewards whoever can appeal to the lowest common denominator.

If you don’t think that content on TikTok doesn’t spread organically then you must be blind to the follow and share mechanisms.
Post reply on HN