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Twitter, TikTok Have Held Preliminary Talks About Possible Combination

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

#101

Post by anaganisk »

momokoko wrote: post #40
danhak wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you see the irony of your posting a cynical, throwaway comment like this while complaining of toxicity on other platforms?

I did not see the parent comment and throwaway. It’s actually a valid insight that there are some alignment between the two platforms. Both appeal to the lower forms of entertainment. In a way they appeal to the same eyeballs. People looking to waste time with little long term benefit. They are both “quick fix” dopamine platforms. So actually this comment is insightful. Is it cynical? Absolutely. But being cynical is…

Ah, I'm wish this comment to be on the main page of n-gate next week. I love how the participants of echo chambers, blame other echo chambers.

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

#102

Post by holler »

arielm wrote: post #57
holler wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Byte never really took off [1]. I’m not a user so I can’t tell if it’s the experience or the existence of TikTok... [1] https://appfigures.com/resources/insights/twia-20200807

> Byte never really took off

Yes so far.. but it's still relatively new. I think competing against TikTok is a challenge, but it doesn't take much for a platform like that to explode in growth... just needs catalyst and continual refinement of the product.

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

#103

Post by tanilama »

mantas wrote: post #86
tanilama wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And US tech companies will be the big loser, if the other countries are going to apply the same national security argument to themselves. Who would they sacrifice then? Obviously, it will be the Big Techs.

Aren't Google and FB already banned in China?

I am not think about China.

Think of Europe. The EU has just realized that by letting US runs internet for itself is costing it money and its technological future.

As what the current administration is doing, the tie is getting weakened and I don't see the trust re-established to its previous level again.

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

#104

Post by mantas »

tanilama wrote: post #103
mantas wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't Google and FB already banned in China?

I am not think about China. Think of Europe. The EU has just realized that by letting US runs internet for itself is costing it money and its technological future. As what the current administration is doing, the tie is getting weakened and I don't see the trust re-established to its previous level again.

EU realised that we missed the internet revolution long time ago. Remember the EU-financed Google killer from mid-00s? :)

Too bad Europe is having fucking hard time to kickstart startups ecosystem.

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

#105

Post by HCDevid »

someperson wrote: post #46
lilyball wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 e…

Anecdotally, although I still rate TikTok's algorithm as better than youtube, the real difference is the long-term engagement. TikTok is always able to deliver content that is interesting to me......Youtube recommendations have a habit of delivering "stale" recommendations for long-term users.

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

#106

Post by HCDevid »

rel2thr wrote: post #45

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?

Although there are separate China & non-Chinese apps, you hit the nail on the head for why a potential acquisition both has serious risk and is going to be a fire sale of TikTok given the 45-day deadline. These are issues which normally would take months to resolve at minimum and would also need a period post-close where operations were slowly separated and Bytedance was still involved for knowledge transfer.

If the acquirer, can make it work, it will be the greatest tech M&A deal since Facebook acquired Instagram in terms of long-term return.

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

#107

Post by lilyball »

someperson wrote: post #46
lilyball wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 e…

I don't use YouTube, but my preschooler does. And YouTube does take any video you watch and immediately start recommending stuff really similar to it, but it gets extremely repetitive. In particular, it keeps recommending literally the same videos. That's actually not a bad approach for young kids, but even they get bored with the same videos eventually.

Also just letting YouTube keep automatically moving on to another video, it pretty quickly gets off into weird territory. It's like YouTube thinks that for any video you watch, you want to hyperfixate on that particular topic and are perfectly happy to end up in some weird video with hand-drawn badly-voiced Sonic and Mario characters having a tea party.

Or perhaps my favorite genre of "where did this come from?" is a series of stop-motion videos with figurines of Ash, Misty, Brock, and for some reason Link (from Zelda), sitting in a classroom, with Nurse Joy as the teacher, who puts up a silhouette of a pokémon on the blackboard and asks what it is, and the characters try to guess. It always ends up with something weird like a silhouette that looks exactly like Voltorb, and once everyone gives up, Nurse Joy reveals it as a top-down view of Jigglypuff. This one is weirdly entertaining. But also just plain weird.

Not quite as good but even weirder is the 3D animated but badly-rendered and badly-animated scenes of lego pokémon with wizard hats and wands that conjure up lego buildings and collaboratively build a farm.

---

I suspect the real difference here is TikTok wants to drive user engagement. It wants me to actively enjoy the videos I'm watching, put likes on them, maybe comment on them, share them with people, make my own videos inspired by them, etc. It wants me to be an active participant in consuming and creating content, and it wants me to always be confident of finding new content I enjoy by going through the feed. And me swiping past a video that I don't care for is perfectly fine as long as I don't have to do that very often.

YouTube on the other hand wants a passive viewer. It wants me to just sit there on the couch slowly going numb as I let it show me videos. If I never touch the remote control, that's a win for YouTube. Every time I hit the menu button to go back to the content list, that means YouTube failed. Picking new unique content is therefore a big risk for YouTube, its best bet is to just stay closely related to whatever it is I just watched, and to slowly migrate towards anything that keeps me fascinated. This means it tends to get weird.

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