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Comment by nilkn | Hacker News Reader

Reels isn’t going to compete with TikTok in any real way for a few simple reasons.

First and foremost, as a non-Instagram user, I flat-out can’t use it. A while back, when I was curious about TikTok, I downloaded it and was instantly swiping through a video feed that was already getting customized for me. I downloaded Instagram this morning and was presented with a wall to create an account. Nope.

Second, TikTok is new. Instagram is old. Young people want to use the newest social app that old people haven’t yet infiltrated.

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> Young people want to use the newest social app that old people haven’t yet infiltrated.

There are actually plenty of people over 30 on TikTok FWIW.

I definitely agree that TikTok's no-login-wall NUX was wonderful. You can even watch on a laptop without logging in.

> There are actually plenty of people over 30 on TikTok FWIW.

And the beauty of TikTok is that's okay. People over 30 can join the app without disrupting my feed of age-relevant content. This is unlike a lot of other social networks (e.g. Reddit) where content is shows from outside my social graph

Yeah, totally – I love that 90% of the time, I have a teenager-free TikTok experience, and most of what I see is interesting to me. But if I want to see what's hip with the kids or whatever, I can always just open up TikTok in a logged-out state and see the /r/all equivalent.

How long will that fly though? Won’t TikTok run into the issue of ensuring that kids must not see adult content?

People also want to use the apps that corporations haven't infiltrated yet. Notice how there's very little advertising / sponsored posts / product placement on TikTok. See: IG is basically the Home Shopping Network now, with an ad between every third post and sponsored products in every mainstream account's feed.

Lol. I use IG mainly for advertisings from local restaurants and hotels. It worked pretty well for me so far. I have discovered so many businesses.

Account creation is so damn outdated. With device fingerprinting you don't need an account to know who is who, and with algorithms pinpointing interests you don't have to ask anything about age / sex / etc. You can figure it all out in a few sessions.

> A while back, when I was curious about TikTok, I downloaded it and was instantly swiping through a video feed that was already getting customized for me.

Has this been definitely proven though? I tried finding evidence of whether TikTok tailors content for unregistered users (based on their location/device for example), but so far, I could not find a page that would even clearly ask that question. Every article about the algorithm I have read only considers registered users...

> Reels isn’t going to compete with TikTok in any real way for a few simple reasons. > First and foremost, as a non-Instagram user, I flat-out can’t use it

Huh – Reels isn't going to compete because you need to download Instagram?

> I downloaded Instagram this morning and was presented with a wall to create an account. Nope

He thinks Reels won’t compete because it forces you to create an Instagram account, you don’t need an account to use TikTok

I can attest it tailors content to at _least_ location. I installed TikTok for the first time yesterday and saw content local to my country (New Zealand) pretty soon, before I signed up.

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