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Comment by justicezyx | Hacker News Reader

According to what I learned from friends who work at tiktok, the parent company are planning to formally sever the business tie with tiktok. Although the technology team is assumed to still share the same infrastructure (networking storage compute etc.). I never was a web or mobile app developer and my friends are not either, and I never used tiktok so have no idea how the client side technology going to be structure.

PS: Tiktok and the purely algorithm driven content consumption is absolutely going to be a super mind washing machine that I will never going to touch, and will teach my kids to stay away as well.

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> absolutely going to be a super mind washing machine

Perhaps; your greater worry should be that kids are prioritising TikTok over other, more important things (like school/sleep)

> will teach my kids to stay away as well

Good luck; it's going to be hard, especially when all their friends will be using it. (Source: I'm a high schooler ;) ) Perhaps an easier path is to teach them to avoid all/most social media. That's what my dad told me to do, and to date I find it a lot easier to say "I'm not on any social media" than "I'm not on TikTok" to my friends.

(HN arguably is social media though...)

HN may be social media, and it can be addictive. But the real crack are infinite scrolling algorithmic feeds optimized for engagement. HN doesn't have one of those.

That's an interesting claim. TikTok has been recruiting rapidly in America, and they structure their offers mostly in terms of their non-fungible funny money, marked to a fantastic valuation (I think they told me Bytedance was worth $300bn or something preposterous). I wonder how they would pay out in a severance of TikTok from the parent company.

> they structure their offers mostly in terms of their non-fungible funny money

Any more info on that?

From memory of previous discussion on HN, all shares/options/similar in mainland Chinese companies are (I think?) worthless to foreigners? With something about people only finding that out the hard way when they tried to cash them in.

Tiktok will ipo on an American exchange and effectively become an American company. The proceeds of the ipo will go to bytedance who will also continue to own and run the Chinese version.

Ahhh, that makes more sense then. Thanks. :)

Don't algorithms dictate what content shows up on HN?

Not all algorithms are created equal.

HN is quite heavily moderated. So is TikTok (much more so).

Really?

I always assumed HN just operate on user voting. And the first batch showing on front-page is handed picked, which I think it's necessary...

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