Ask HN: Why US companies are not beating TikTok in the field? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Why US companies are not beating TikTok in the field?

#11

Post by DEADBEEFC0FFEE » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 9:14 AM UTC

muzani wrote: post #5

Instagram is about me. It's about how beautiful I am, how much my kids love me, how popular I am, how influential I am. Facebook is about my political beliefs. LinkedIn is about how hardworking and clever I am. Twitter is about my thoughts. TikTok is about you, the audience. The people posting in TikTok are creators. It doesn't matter if my post is not funny or clumsy or taken with a bad camera. It doesn't matter tha…

Another important differences is that copying and remixing is an integral part of the platform. A dance or a tune can be used by someone and millions might be using either by the end of the day, and it's gone the next.

While I don't care for it myself, I talk about it with my kids and it's fascinating.

Re: Ask HN: Why US companies are not beating TikTok in the field?

#12

Post by hackermailman » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 3:54 PM UTC

muzani wrote: post #7

noteanddata wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, Instagram and other social platform/media are still very different from tiktok from product concept. the curious question is, why google or facebook or snapchat are not making another large scale product like that if there is a market for this kind of product (short video)

The product isn't short video. It's making a quick, low friction social connection to a group of people.

Social connection through memes. Image memes you have original pic that is passed around, then a million variations. Tiktok is the same, orig very short video then a million variations

There's also not nearly as much censorship, meaning you can have music clips and own remixes unlike youtube where 'this audio was deleted by content owner'. Snapchat only recently let you used 'licensed audio' https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/snapchat-add-songs-mus...

Re: Ask HN: Why US companies are not beating TikTok in the field?

#13

Post by noteanddata » Tue, Aug 04, 2020, 3:29 AM UTC

qppo wrote: post #9

imo there are political, technical, and economic reasons. The Chinese Communist Party won't let an American social/content app run unfettered behind the Great Firewall. The American tech industry is printing money with B2B SaaS products, while consumer products are much riskier. Add in that video at scale is incredibly expensive, and you have all the economic/technical barriers against you to getting enough money to…

when it's expensive, but the US companies like Google, FB and so on should have far more money than tiktok, why wouldn't they do these big bets there?