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Comment by Firebrand | Hacker News Reader

It’s been reported Facebook has been offering exclusivity contracts to some of TikTok’s most followed personalities for its new competitor, Reels. It reminds me of Microsoft’s streaming platform giving millions to Ninja and Shroud only to close it down months later.

TikTok has been very good at focusing on new content discovery first when you open the app, making you swipe left to see the people you follow second—this is the opposite of Instagram. If Facebook does manage to pull people like Charli D’Amelio and Addison Rae to Reels and makes them more prominent, it would really be interesting to see two different philosophies compete against each other.

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I feel that new personalities would just take their places given TikTok's would just push different videos should some leave. Since the magic of TikTok is the "for you" page, if reels does not replicate well then it may not take away a significant share. While instagram stories hampered growth from snap, they've also seemed to have some failures ex. competing against twitch. There were some tournaments hosted on the fb gaming platform but it seems like many of them have returned to twitch.

Have there been any major Facebook flops? They seem to be very successful in acquiring (WhatsApp, Instagram) and diversifying (Facebook Messenger, Instagram Stories) the next social thing. They are no Yahoo or, on occasion, Microsoft.

Moments, Poke, Camera are a few. Local could be huge if they had the right strategy.

Facebook keeps putting this bizarre emphasis on stamping their brand on everything they come up with to keep their brandname relevant.

Sounds more like Facebook should restructure as a holding company and keep creating independent concepts to see what succeeds, but keeping the Facebook name is likely an ego-driven decision.

When they sponsored ‘The Last Dance’ on ESPN, they referred to themselves as The Facebook Company. I thought that was interesting.

Facebook are smart. They are well aware of the changes in the social network sphere and the fact that pretty much every single platform at some point starts loosing customer base because they move on to the new ones. So as long as Facebook keeps buying the ones whilst pulling billions in progress, they are fine.

Maybe not a major flop, but Facebook’s original TikTok competitor, Lasso, was shut down. They tried to go after the Musical.ly half of TikTok’s user base that likes dancing to music.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/01/lasso-facebook-tiktok-shut...

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