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

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

6 pointsnoteanddata12 comments

it's surprising that tiktok is so successful globally. and there is not a US product that is truly beating it. and now US are considering ban it or buy it.

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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 that I'm ugly. It's about me participating with you. You can interact with my video side by side.

There's a lot of dance stuff but the dancing is just the easy entry. There's cooking videos, science experiments, confessions, inspirational videos, camera tips, art, pranks, and so on.

Their best competitor is YouTube, which does well, but feels a little elitist and doesn't have the little microinteractions. TikTok has mastered 30 second stories. The other social media had recognized that people want brief stories (and even call the feature stories) but they haven't really capitalized on it.

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.

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...

Because Instagram and the likes do/did not have access to the huge mainland Chinese market.

It's kind of hilarious that TikTok is basically Vine with longer videos. Wonder if the Twitter exec that shut it down is kicking themselves.

Instagram has 1B+ monthly active users (MAU) and TikTok has 800M MAU [0]. This year, TikTok has accumulated more downloads and user growth which makes it the fastest growing social network in the world. [1]

The actual competitive factor to this growth is TikTok / Douyin has access to the Chinese market and outside of China which is why it is considered as a serious competitor. Everyone else is banned.

[0] https://sproutsocial.com/insights/instagram-stats/

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/c6a8b9bc-dd6d-46a7-b008-825568982...

Triller is trying really hard. They were first to market but haven't grown as fast.

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 build the infrastructure to scale up to the billions of users on TikTok.

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?

Vine was doing something similar.

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