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

TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 464 posts

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#361

Post by nemo44x »

moolcool wrote: post #291
nemo44x wrote: post #257

Social media and Websites in general are like TV shows or recording artists - they exist within an era and eventually become legacy/classic and irrelevant to the new youth culture. No one wants to engage with the same cultural artifacts of their parents or the previous generation. They want to establish themselves as a distinct cultural era and need symbols, etc that are distinct.

I don't doubt that this is the case to some extent, but I also think that good products (and apps are no exception), once they become popular, inevitably get ground into dust by the unending desire for unlimited growth at any cost.

Eventually bad managers make bad choices. Inventors dilemma happens, etc.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#362

Post by frankosaurus »

zjaffee wrote: post #347
mrtksn wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, FB and others moved away from being about your friends to become content sharing machines long time ago. It’s like reddit but without sub separation + influencer glamour. Tiktok on the other hand came from purely creative angle. It’s not about your friends, it’s about using creative tools to express something. That’s why TikTok dominated the original new content market. TikTok’s editing tools are ph…

I have to disagree with that, snapchat was just as innovative if not more so in the early days of tiktok and musically in the space around camera filters and editing. There are two big things that make tiktok unique. The for you page, and shared sounds that are able to go very viral rapidly. No other platform has been able to circulate viral videos as quickly as tiktok has proven to be able to, and the for you page,…

> shared sounds that are able to go very viral rapidly

Shared sounds was a nifty innovation and TikTok executed it well.

While FB always focused on their vaunted friends graph, there was an entirely separate graph waiting to be discovered which had nothing to do with friendship:

i.e. A graph of people worldwide who have lipsynced (or danced) to the same tune. It's a clever way to inject novelty (and dopamine) into the system!

Seems obvious in retrospect, of course.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#363

Post by bobthepanda »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #265
ironlake wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>fediverse needs to go mainstream. Mastodon has been around for more than five years, and the idea of decentralized social networks long before that. Email, from a user standpoint, was much like Mastodon: a protocol that you consumed with software of your choice. But it was never a great experience for the average user, then gmail made it a great experience. People switched very quickly. The experience has to be firs…

Just want to highlight that this is a very tech-focused perspective. "If we make it good enough people will use it!" Also is there room in this utopia for people who want their privacy and secrecy? Will they be disadvantaged if they don't participate in this digital phone booth? My gut tells me yes.

I don’t think they’re making an argument that it’s sufficient to attract people, but that it is necessary.

Obviously any sort of serious effort will need some sort of marketing or other social push, but you can market a pile of dog poop all you want and nobody will be interested.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#364

Post by ipaddr »

Apocryphon wrote: post #342
IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Old media” suffered far more from the competition by Craigslist and eBay, which drove away almost all their income in classifieds, which made up around a third to half of all income at average newspapers. And yet… there just wasn’t any criticism of those companies at any scale comparable to what Facebook gets. That’s evidende against this theory that journalists are somehow working for the commercial interest of pub…

That’s an excellent point. For all of the scams and abuses that could emerge from Craigslist, there was never a concerted media effort to label the platform as dangerous or untrustworthy.

That's the image the media gave but this happened 10-15 years ago before the press turned on companies.

Craigslist was untrustworthy, ebay as well. The whole internet was untrustworthy. Things only became dangerous when non-computer users got a cell phone.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#365

Post by cwkoss »

k4rli wrote: post #139
nprateem wrote: post #90

A good analysis. Whether you like it or not, Tiktok is a classic example of disruption. They've not only circumvented the moat of their biggest competitors, but made it a liability - FB & Insta can't just abandon the social graph without disenfranchinsing their existing users. Absolutely textbook innovation.

Is there innovation? Seems like Tiktok is just a more "evil" iteration of Vine.

lol, why do you think tiktok is evil?

seems the xenophobic propaganda is being successful. there isnt a single valid arguement that 'tiktok is evil' that doesn't apply even better to facebook or youtube.

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#366

Post by gretch »

ishjoh wrote: post #344
ironlake wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>fediverse needs to go mainstream. Mastodon has been around for more than five years, and the idea of decentralized social networks long before that. Email, from a user standpoint, was much like Mastodon: a protocol that you consumed with software of your choice. But it was never a great experience for the average user, then gmail made it a great experience. People switched very quickly. The experience has to be firs…

I remember switching to gmail only because they offered 1Gb of storage, which at the time other email hosts were only offering for paid subscribers. In my circle this was the biggest reason to switch, not because the UX was much better than any other providers.

Storage capacity is a part of the eXperience story.

Before Gmail's groundbreaking 1GB limit, you had offerings like 15mb or 100mb from yahoo or hotmail. What that meant for your day to day experience would be that you would literally run out of space and then have to manually comb through your inbox to delete things you don't want. And if you wanted stuff, you had to harshly prioritize between treasured message threads.

These are all part of the UX

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#367

Post by labrador »

roody15 wrote: post #355

"This explains Facebook’s recent transition toward short videos and algorithmic recommendations of content that doesn’t come from friend groups." I agree with the authors perspective that if Facebook and Twitter try and capture the TikTok market they will only in the end up hurting themselves. In fact the reason I don't use Facebook much anymore is because of the changes they have made... When I login I may see a fun…

I've posited before on HN that Facebook is dying based on my observations as a long time user. A lot of people said I was wrong and it's strength is in it groups and marketplaces. I wouldn't know because I don't get a lot of satisfaction from groups and I don't use the marketplace, but people say that they serve as a small town gathering place in a lot of locations, sort like Craigslist was for awhile.

I don't see how introducing flashy short videos that produce a dopamine hit in the easily amused is going to grow Facebook

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#368

Post by bastardoperator »

Facebook and twitter are out of ideas. What bothers me the most is the failure of both executive teams on multiple levels, but yet again it's the workers that end up with the short of end of the stick.

Zuckerberg says be on the lookout for low performers so he can cut 10% of his staff, he needs to look in the mirror...

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#369

Post by gretch »

labrador wrote: post #367
roody15 wrote: post #355

"This explains Facebook’s recent transition toward short videos and algorithmic recommendations of content that doesn’t come from friend groups." I agree with the authors perspective that if Facebook and Twitter try and capture the TikTok market they will only in the end up hurting themselves. In fact the reason I don't use Facebook much anymore is because of the changes they have made... When I login I may see a fun…

I've posited before on HN that Facebook is dying based on my observations as a long time user. A lot of people said I was wrong and it's strength is in it groups and marketplaces. I wouldn't know because I don't get a lot of satisfaction from groups and I don't use the marketplace, but people say that they serve as a small town gathering place in a lot of locations, sort like Craigslist was for awhile. I don't see ho…

>I've posited before on HN that Facebook is dying based on my observations as a long time user. A lot of people said I was wrong and it's strength is in it groups and marketplaces.

People said you were wrong, not because you were technically wrong, but because what you said was dilute to the point of being meaningless.

All great things die. Look at the great companies of old: GE, Sears, IBM. They all suck now. One day FB, Google, Apple, etc will join them. That's the natural cycle of things

So just saying 'FB is dying' is like stating the Earth is dying because the sun explodes in a couple billion years. Yeah we get it... and?

Mean while though, during an economic down turn, they came in missed revenue by 1% while microsoft missed by 3%. They still make 20B+ dollars per quarter.

So like, what's your point?

Re: TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

#370

Post by EnKopVand »

labrador wrote: post #367
roody15 wrote: post #355

"This explains Facebook’s recent transition toward short videos and algorithmic recommendations of content that doesn’t come from friend groups." I agree with the authors perspective that if Facebook and Twitter try and capture the TikTok market they will only in the end up hurting themselves. In fact the reason I don't use Facebook much anymore is because of the changes they have made... When I login I may see a fun…

I've posited before on HN that Facebook is dying based on my observations as a long time user. A lot of people said I was wrong and it's strength is in it groups and marketplaces. I wouldn't know because I don't get a lot of satisfaction from groups and I don't use the marketplace, but people say that they serve as a small town gathering place in a lot of locations, sort like Craigslist was for awhile. I don't see ho…

Facebook groups and events is basically the only reason I use Facebook, and while it’s very anecdotal I’m not the only one in my also anecdotal network.

It’s not actually the functionality that works for Facebook, it’s the fact that people have a Facebook account that they check. As more and more people quit, it becomes more and more of a bother to continue using Facebook to organise things, but when they have 3 billion users, they’ll probably remain a good place for groups and events for quite a long time to come, unless someone figures out how to do it with e-mail, which is basically the only other thing that everyone also has.

As others point out, social media sort of leaves a gap as far as being “the people registrar” or a modern form of the yellow pages. But as long as so many of us remain on there because it is what it is, then they can really continue to fuck around quite a bit before “dying”. I think it’ll be legislation that kills them in the end, because unlike other large American tech companies, Facebook doesn’t seem to have a plan that doesn’t involve making money off privacy data. Even though Google is obviously struggling with being an advertisement company first, they could potentially shift to other products, but what can Facebook really do?

Post reply on HN