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A TikTok ban would deal a blow to creators, businesses and the American economy

forbes.com

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Re: A TikTok ban would deal a blow to creators, businesses and the American economy

#61

Post by volf_ »

paxys wrote: post #39

Do they think TikTok's user base will disappear overnight? There are a thousand competitors out there, and one of them will fill the gap. There may be a temporary disruption, sure, but that is still better than having a key chunk of the American economy (and young American eyeballs) directly controlled by the CCP.

TikTok has one of the lowest bars to monetization out of all the major social media networks.

There is a large amount of creators on the platform that live off their content and eCommerce enabled through the platform. So it disappearing overnight would severely impact people who have a majority of their livelihood through the app.

Facebook. Twitter. YouTube. They all have short form video, but TikTok has a lot of features that just don't exist on other platforms.

Re: A TikTok ban would deal a blow to creators, businesses and the American economy

#62

Post by glimshe »

Let me rephrase this as what will probably happen: the TikTok ban will be barely felt and will likely add to the American Economy as competitors that aren't tied to China appear. And if TikTok can't be perfectly emulated, it will actually increase the productivity of Americans who are now being held captive by a foreign-controlled algorithm which is fine-tuned to exploit physiological weaknesses.

Re: A TikTok ban would deal a blow to creators, businesses and the American economy

#63

Post by FredPret »

jtriangle wrote: post #59
paxys wrote: post #39

Do they think TikTok's user base will disappear overnight? There are a thousand competitors out there, and one of them will fill the gap. There may be a temporary disruption, sure, but that is still better than having a key chunk of the American economy (and young American eyeballs) directly controlled by the CCP.

They certainly won't disappear overnight. In fact, they will be very, very upset with those that took their platform away. Millions of upset people, and, if you're worried about the CCP, well, they'll have plenty of time to tell those millions of very upset people anything they'd like. So really on either end of this, well, you have potentially bad outcomes. What's worse, people watching cat dance videos, or, people…

Every US publicly traded company of course has to kowtow [0] to the US national agenda. How else could it work?

The cold war with China is here to stay. Trump started it, Biden continued it, and now it's on the agenda for good. China is openly striving to supplant the US as the premier power. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowtow

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-26/xi-s-vow-...

Re: A TikTok ban would deal a blow to creators, businesses and the American economy

#64

Post by mschuster91 »

FredPret wrote: post #63
jtriangle wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They certainly won't disappear overnight. In fact, they will be very, very upset with those that took their platform away. Millions of upset people, and, if you're worried about the CCP, well, they'll have plenty of time to tell those millions of very upset people anything they'd like. So really on either end of this, well, you have potentially bad outcomes. What's worse, people watching cat dance videos, or, people…

Every US publicly traded company of course has to kowtow [0] to the US national agenda. How else could it work? The cold war with China is here to stay. Trump started it, Biden continued it, and now it's on the agenda for good. China is openly striving to supplant the US as the premier power. [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowtow [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-26/xi-s-vow-...

There's a difference between playing along with what the US government wants and having to have a parallel chain of command with CCP "party cells" in your company.

And there's more than enough US companies actively opposing what the US government want, most notably Google who went and encrypted all their internal traffic so that it couldn't be tapped any more.

Re: A TikTok ban would deal a blow to creators, businesses and the American economy

#65

Post by faeriechangling »

I have STRONG doubts banning TikTok would hurt the American economy.

A blow to creators, sure. A blow to businesses? Maybe but it would probably make their workforce less depressed and slack off less so I don’t think so. The economy?

How is pilfering off US dollars to China have TikTok addict them and ad-men brainwash them help the economy? This is before we even get into if the economy would be worth the sacrifice even if it did help the economy.

The only plausible negative consequence economically would be from Chinese retaliation and frankly they’ve been playing dirty for ages having long banned US social media and the US has broadly failed to go tit for tat with them due to a “free trade” doctrine that the US should simply not be provoked by or react to non-tariff trade barriers and instead act with the utmost naivety. So I don’t even think the threat of retaliation should scare anybody since it’s still game theoretically correct to retaliate.

Re: A TikTok ban would deal a blow to creators, businesses and the American economy

#66

Post by Clubber »

glimshe wrote: post #62

Let me rephrase this as what will probably happen: the TikTok ban will be barely felt and will likely add to the American Economy as competitors that aren't tied to China appear. And if TikTok can't be perfectly emulated, it will actually increase the productivity of Americans who are now being held captive by a foreign-controlled algorithm which is fine-tuned to exploit physiological weaknesses.

Adam Curry theorized on his podcast a few years ago that the TikTok ban chatter was a protectionist move to help Facebook, Twitter and other US social media companies.

Re: A TikTok ban would deal a blow to creators, businesses and the American economy

#67

Post by zooq_ai »

glimshe wrote: post #62

Let me rephrase this as what will probably happen: the TikTok ban will be barely felt and will likely add to the American Economy as competitors that aren't tied to China appear. And if TikTok can't be perfectly emulated, it will actually increase the productivity of Americans who are now being held captive by a foreign-controlled algorithm which is fine-tuned to exploit physiological weaknesses.

Why does HN and other Tech elitists treat creator/influencers with disdain that they don't show the same sympathy as they would to other professions?.

This is akin to saying "Mom and Shop Retail closes? who cares, the workers can go work at Walmart" "Coal Industry shut down? who cares, they can learn to code"

It's not easy for someone to easily rebuild audience from one platform to another or easily transfer the skills required from one platform to another.

Remember these are small businesses run by people with little technical skills. Many have toiled to be where they are.

Re: A TikTok ban would deal a blow to creators, businesses and the American economy

#68

Post by nozzlegear »

jtriangle wrote: post #59
paxys wrote: post #39

Do they think TikTok's user base will disappear overnight? There are a thousand competitors out there, and one of them will fill the gap. There may be a temporary disruption, sure, but that is still better than having a key chunk of the American economy (and young American eyeballs) directly controlled by the CCP.

They certainly won't disappear overnight. In fact, they will be very, very upset with those that took their platform away. Millions of upset people, and, if you're worried about the CCP, well, they'll have plenty of time to tell those millions of very upset people anything they'd like. So really on either end of this, well, you have potentially bad outcomes. What's worse, people watching cat dance videos, or, people…

Is your argument that we shouldn’t ban TikTok because the CCP can manipulate upset users? Isn’t that one of the reasons we’re banning it in the first place?

Re: A TikTok ban would deal a blow to creators, businesses and the American economy

#69

Post by ok123456 »

glimshe wrote: post #62

Let me rephrase this as what will probably happen: the TikTok ban will be barely felt and will likely add to the American Economy as competitors that aren't tied to China appear. And if TikTok can't be perfectly emulated, it will actually increase the productivity of Americans who are now being held captive by a foreign-controlled algorithm which is fine-tuned to exploit physiological weaknesses.

Why have all the TikTok competitors launched by US social media companies been total flops, then?

Re: A TikTok ban would deal a blow to creators, businesses and the American economy

#70

Post by zooq_ai »

Justin_K wrote: post #2

Staying away from the politics, anybody who has a business model completely dependent upon a single service’s algorithm should question what kind of business they have.

I'm sure you have the same sympathy for Coal workers, Steel workers, Mom & Pop Retail, right? or is this specially reserved for people who make a living out of content creation, just because you don't like it
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