YouTube launches TikTok competitor, Shorts | Hacker News Reader

YouTube launches TikTok competitor, Shorts

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79 pointsSalimoS95 comments

Why did Twitter end up killing Vine? Seems like a bad decision now since TikTok is pretty much a direct replacement. I thought Vine was quite popular back in the day.

My group of friends used to use Vine all the time. Never used twitter. I was quite shocked when they killed it.

I wonder how Twitter is even alive because the amount of mismanagement that happened in the last 10 years is staggering.

Winner-takes-all-network-effect-first-mover-advantage.

A spectacular example of how hard it can be to remove a networked product/service once it's entrenched.

You can do a lot of things wrong if you reach that position, and still keep your place.

People will reference MySpace as a counter to that. Except MySpace was never close to being entrenched, they had no moat or stake in the ground. They never had all the world's celebrities and politicians on their platform, using it as a core broadcast method to the world.

At their peak in 2006-2007, MySpace's monthly active users measured in the tens of millions. Certainly very large for its time, however as a general purpose social network meant to pursue max scale, MySpace contrasted against Facebook demonstrates just how dramatically far away from entrenched-scale MySpace really was (they got maybe 10%-20% of the way there).

To put it into perspective, Cristiano Ronaldo's following on Instagram is as big as MySpace at its peak. Now that's an entrenched max audience social network in action.

MySpace was too early, before there were enough global users to even be able to obtain that level of necessary entrenchment protection. Their network - for its specific purpose - was small enough that it was still quite possible to unseat them. Facebook's boom phase also coincided perfectly with the rise of the modern app smartphone beginning in 2007-2008, which ultimately brought the Internet to a dramatically larger audience around the world (and was responsible for enabling Facebook to reach three billion users; without the smartphone that would either never happen or would have taken several more decades).

I reference the type or purpose aspect because obviously not all social networks are max scale general purpose networks. Twitter's potential base isn't three billion users, as that many people will never want to use the platform under any circumstances. Each type of social network has a max potential userbase (Pinterest's max base is different from LinkedIn's which is different from Facebook's). Twitter has likely heavily (not entirely) saturated their maximum reach and long since gotten to the required entrenchment scale for what they particularly do.

Twitter has pretty much captured the bite-sized, piecemeal form of Internet-based content in tweets and such.

I wondered the same thing. It's the exact same service that just changes hands every few years under a new brand.

In grade school before the internet, this occurred through physical products. My first grade trend was Yo Yo (Yomega, Brainstorm, Duncan), second grade Pokemon trading cards (Digimon, Magic, Yu Gi Oh), third grade finger skateboards (TechDeck), fourth and fifth segways into middle school when social systems are developing so its clothes brand trend pursuit which is when I checked out because video games were starting to get interesting.

Phones and Xanga/Myspace arrived roundabout when I got my driver's license.

I'm sure there were similar toy brand trends pre-covid when kids were still seeing each other every day and sharing physical toys.

TikTok released some official report the other day in compliance with whatever legal motions were recently filed, and it keeps saying the word "clusters" when referring to users.

I guess it's just yet another company that wants to compete over access to "clusters" of users aged 12-35 (that's the widest age range I would expect to be concerned with the latest communication app offering that enables the exact same utility they already had with Vine/Snap/Tik).

Not-really-affiliated-but-kind-of Byte (https://byte.co/) totally failed with its launch, such a shame.

It has failed? How so? I checked them out when they first launched and they seemed to be doing pretty great. What happened?

I have Byte and browse it every now and then. Maybe it failed if the only metric of success is hockey stick growth, but when I open it I see an active community.

If it does well enough to be self-sustainable then I consider that a success. Not everything has to be Silicon Valley level stratospheric.

Mark Zuckerberg: “Twitter is such as mess — it’s as if they drove a clown car into a gold mine and fell in.”

The irony is heavy.

Facebook isn't a mess business-wise, they print money

Not only has Facebook always run their business in a vastly superior way in terms of cost in the system, they never went through something equivalent to the fail whale mess that plagued Twitter. Facebook's performance problems have been minor compared to what Twitter has gone through.

As a business, Twitter should be far more profitable than they are, their profit margin is 1/3 that of Facebook at the same level of sales (2011 for Facebook), despite having 1/2 the number of users that Facebook had at that point time.

I was referring more generally to how they print money (gold mine) despite, or maybe because of, a user and privacy hostile experience (clown car).

Thank you! When my kids tried to explain TikTok to me I responded, "So it is Vine?"

My kids still watch Vine compilations on YouTube, and they are mystified as to why it was shut down.

There were even celebrities using it to make funny videos. They had good timing and foresaw where social media was going. Baffling how they couldn’t monetize it.

I don’t know why people say this.

Vine was nothing like TikTok. The editing tools of TikTok are vastly superior and lead to much higher quality videos with higher probability of being worth watching.

Vine was mostly shitty little 6 second clips of meme like content. Good for some laughs, but ultimately vapid and shallow. By the time they even wanted to experiment with longer format content they were done.

That’s not even mentioning cultural differences.

> Vine was mostly shitty little 6 second clips of meme like content.

Isn't this what Tiktok is? I thought it was mostly tweens dancing and lip syncing.

They can both be summed up as "meme like content" but beyond that they're really very different. I'm not sure why the OP is being downvoted, really.

Try actually using TikTok. For more than a few minutes.

I tried it. The majority of videos for a new user account came up as either incredibly inappropriate videos of tweens or incredibly racist videos of tweens (seriously, I was surprised at how many racist/pedophile jokes came up). Maybe if you curate your liked videos you can get out of that, but I genuinely felt uncomfortable using it as a 30yo.

I have no problem consistently getting older TikTokkers. I like their content and the algos oblige.

I also tried after hearing people on HN speak so highly of their recommendation system.. I only watched (in full length)/searched for/liked videos of a specific gender/race/age group.. yet even after liking over a hundred videos, then 100% of the videos they suggested to me were the wrong gender/race/age group. YouTube on the other hand is capable of recommending the correct videos after watching just a couple.

It’s very easy to conduct this experiment, just make sure that the race you target doesn’t represent the majority of the users in your proximity. For instance, if you’re in Norway then try to get TikTok to recommend Asian girls aged 20-35.. sounds like it should be easy, right?

Like most anything else non-simplistic, it's easy to form an inaccurate picture of something with a casual examination, and TikTok is one of these things (in that it contains communications from humans, on of the most complex things in existence).

An example of the good stuff you can run across on TikTok is this lady:

https://www.tiktok.com/@arizonagypsy

Roughly, she made some videos lamenting the phenomenon of how her children and grandchildren have ~"forgotten" her, despite the fundamentally important role she played in their life in the past.

I couldn't find the original video (why can't you sort by date posted!!!???), but these give you an approximate idea:

https://www.tiktok.com/@arizonagypsy/video/68683101136402874...

https://www.tiktok.com/@arizonagypsy/video/68683779147448517...

I think it would be fair to say she has a feeling of not being wanted/valued, not being useful in the complex new world we've created. Something like that.

Well as it turns out, these posts seem to have struck a chord with a fair amount of people (35.8K Followers, 396.5K Likes), and she now fairly regularly does live streams (she was initially extremely hesitant, because she didn't really see why people would want to watch, which is somewhat paradoxical to her original complaint) with >100 (last time I watched) people watching who just ask her random questions and she answers them. Everyone seems to get something out of it: she now has a genuine purpose and value in life, and viewers have the opportunity to ask questions for which the answers cannot be found on the internet, if they're even there at all.

I personally think this is a form of Magick[1], and I mean that not only unironically, but I think this is what we need to get us out of the absolute mess we've created on this planet. Education, logic and critical thinking, which we're not nearly as good at as we perceive, doesn't seem like it's anywhere near up to a task this large.

[1]

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Magick

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magick_(Thelema)

Just like reddit default front page and the Google News front and the Twitter front page.

But people love the subreddits for their interests.

There's no way to make a single front-page that everyone likes.

TikTok doesn't have the 7sec limit that killed Vine's breadth of use cases.

The lead Viners demanded to be paid while Twitter completely failed to monetise it. https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/28/13456208/why-vine-died-t...

I can’t really feel bad for the Viners. I sympathize with the idea that Twitter is/was mooching off free content, but at the same time: One should never make content with the expectation of getting paid, and then post on a free website that doesn’t pay anyone.

The thing with tiktok, it’s really easy for content creators to insert links to their websites, merch, other social medias into videos so it allows them to make some money from interested users.

Whereas US-centric apps like Instagram do everything possible to prevent users from leaving the walled garden. "Link in bio" is commonplace for numerous accounts. User-hostile and completely antithetical to the idea of an interlinked web.

I've never seen more than one link in a person's profile on TikTok, and "link in profile" is still a common phrase on there.

Vine was delightful. A lot of funny stuff on it all the time.

I think Twitter was incompetent when trying to make it a business.

It’s the Minecraft effect. Just because a person or organization hits it huge once doesn’t mean they know what they’re doing and will be able to repeat success.

Twitter couldn’t figure out a monetization strategy. Also the main reason tiktok grew so popular is bec of their algo, good algos is something twitter sucks at. Finally the idea of using an algo to surface content the way tiktok is doing is actually novel and wasn’t really apparent 5 years ago.

I think I'm missing something. why was it novel to use an algo to surface content 5 years ago? Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc have both been doing that for a very long time

is there something unique about how tiktok is doing it?

I'd say that is the business model Tik Tok "WTF happened to Vine"? Vine was popular but not exploited (for lack of a better term) so Tik Tok picked up where Vine left off.

Does the example gif look like content people would want to see? I don't really know what TikTok is like but that looks like unremarkable strangers singing in an unremarkable context.

Probably made as an example by someone that isn't used to create that kind of viral stuff.

To me it signals that it's a platform for the everyday user rather than a small set of pixel-perfect influencers.

Does that appeal to anyone? I got the impression TikTok was all about awesome sensational feeling stuff. This platform sounds like the opposite, which is a weird take I would think.

I don't use TikTok, but I spent an evening last week sitting with someone who was using it. If they're usage is at all typical, then it was mostly "normal" people doing weird / funny things.

The thing about TikTok is it’s a very different experience for different people due to its recommendation algorithm.

Definitely not. I never want to see a >6MB GIF.

(Yeah, Shorts won’t be using a GIF, but I must grumble about news articles using GIFs when they’re a stupidly bad way of representing a video. I honestly have no idea why any reputable news organisation would ever use GIFs like this.)

Mainly because animated GIFs bypass autoplay restrictions

Asking this question makes me sound really dumb, but... do TikTok creators get paid like YouTube creators? If not, this seems to be a strong advantage that YouTube has. As much as people complain about the monetization system, something is better than nothing, right?

You can get paid as a TikTok creator ...

Tell that to the creators making 6 dollars per million views :)

I never looked into this but couple of links show that it's much more than $6/Million views.

> On average, my videos that have over 1,000,000 views have usually earned between $2,000-$5,000.

https://onezero.medium.com/this-is-how-much-youtube-paid-me-...

Some more links -

https://turbo.intuit.com/blog/relationships/how-much-do-yout...

Research Nasim Aghdam. Youtube simply deems content unmonetizable. You'll get good rates on 5 views and 0 rates on a million views. :)

Further, your 1M view video on mesothelioma is going to be paid much more than your 100M view video on needle drugs

Designed in China, Manufactured in California

oh the turntables

I have a feeling this is going to be an increasingly common theme.

At the moment it seems like there is more competition and thus more new ideas coming out of China. Social media in the west seem to be dominated by a few giants that succesfully chokes any newcomers before they get started.

it s an old story. Most of the social games that became popular, most of the stuff that zynga did was copied from simpler social games that were popular in china/japan

I thought Vine was designed in California as well.

It’s amazing to me that Google execs fail to realize tiktok’s success isn’t because of features, but because of social and cultural relationships and intricacies. You can’t copy a socially evolved trend in a boardroom and expect it to work. Especially with a silly name like “shorts”.

Yes but what do you expect from the people who brought the world Google+? Google prints money in so many ways they should just stop trying to get into the social media game at this point. Stick to search, ads, email, cloud services, hardware, etc etc etc...

> Especially with a silly name like “shorts”.

It's not even multilingual, which shows how little thought went into its selection

It's better than the working title, Google Play Youtube Shorts One Play Red.

If I understood it correctly, they are adding it in the main app itself. Would a separate app make more sense, as YT is where I mostly go for watching mid/long length videos usually and their consumption pattern would be way different.

Also, would the recommendations work differently here, at present YT recommendations seem to have a very high recency bias. Short videos will have inherently different engagement metrics too, so hopefully recommendations for both work differently.

But this is why I was very surprised with the rumoured $50B value for Tiktok, there are plenty of players who can disrupt it. Companies like YT, FB already know how to build social video platforms at scale. Just need to nail the creation tools and recommendations.

> If I understood it correctly, they are adding it in the main app itself. Would a separate app make more sense, as YT is where I mostly go for watching mid/long length videos usually and their consumption pattern would be way different.

I never understand when companies bundle a different app, as a feature inside their main app. Just bloating it and weakening the UX. Pretty much how IG did with Reels. There is a limit on how much you can stretch what a "tool" can do before breaking it and no longer full-filling any need.

It would be much cleaner and clever for Google/YT to launch a 'different App' and then try to differentiate it and carve a niche for small videos. Trying to compete with Tik Tok being a "better" Tik Tok is certainly a dead end.

Distribution. Getting an app installed is super tough.

Embedding an app is a great growth hack.

But why not also have a standalone to build stronger affiliation?

yes, it's a shortcut

The short videos are alongside the long-form content. They divert user attention if the long feature hits a lull. The investment of the short video is perceived to be lower, so users will stay in the app for longer.

Coming to https://killedbygoogle.com/ in about two years.

Best it can do is 6 months

"The company is hoping that considering people already come to YouTube for short video entertainment, Shorts will be another way to keep people on the site longer and get both existing and new creators to continue uploading."

But the content creators with the most subscribers and the most views are the ones with longer, well produced videos. Not sure if people who come to the site to consume longer videos will appreciate 15-second short videos as well

They will love the loop of an unskippable 15-second ad followed by a 15-second video.

They have been experimenting with this for a few days now. A slightly different, possibly less branded version of this had already been on the Youtube app. I found myself sucked into it last week. I clicked on what looked like a funny short video and, before I knew it, I was 10+ videos onto the rabbithole. Whatever algorithm they are using, I think they really nailed it.

I saw a lot of people spend an enormous amount of time in Uni (last few years) just scrolling and watching videos for hours on YouTube, I know it's a bit of a running joke how quickly Google axes projects, but the users/demand are already there and monetizing YouTube subs is significantly easier than monetizing TikTok followers.

Sounds like they are making the same mistake as Instagram is making: Trying to copy TikTok into their existing app.

It is really a different media and they will end up annoying their existing users, making their app overly complex, canibalising their advertisement etc. etc.

I'm surprised about the absence of disruptive startups in this space.

Wasn't this space opened up by the death of vine?

I think that the death of vine discouraged most attempts at making short social video apps.

Musically (which became TikTok) launched shortly after Vine.

There was lipdubs that were popular. I think that started the whole trend. Vine was certainly an initial iteration, it shows that you don't have to be first! I think the discovery algorithm or at least the discovery presentation is the most important part. Reels and SnapChat both have "shorts" but they don't deliver in the same way as TikTok.

High hosting costs and difficult to monetize at first.

Of course, the greatest barrier is making something that is massively popular.

How is Instagram Reels doing and why will Shorts fare any different?

I haven't looked at the Shorts feature, but I think the fact that both Reels and Shorts are being integrated into bigger, well-established interfaces will make a big difference (quite possibly negative).

TikTok is just TikToks. Reels have to fight for positioning in an overall sea of Instagram features and Shorts will do the same. YouTube and Instagram have different focuses, though, and I think that could make a huge difference in the uptake.

So my point is "they're sitting in different user experiences", which is why they'll fare differently. I just can't predict which will do better!

Don't worry, they will shut it down within 2 years.

https://killedbygoogle.com/

How easy would it be to build such a tool, but directly using Youtube's API instead? A while back I tried to build an android app that uses youtube's RSS to follow only a few news channels. Issue on Android was that you cannot embed a Youtube player in a Custom View. The API is able to detect this by measuring the distance from the player container, to the edges of the screen.

I made an app a few years back that aggregated content from /r/youtubehaiku (a subreddit devoted to short, typically comedic youtube videos) fairly trivially.

Well still youtube thinks I like bomb videos after beirut explosion. What's good about tiktok is their algorithm of picking videos for users to watch.

And soon to be crypto scam ads and videos on there too ,which YouTube will ignore

I predict this will be about as successful as Google+.

Google+ had a network problem in my usage at least, and FB back in 2011 wasn't plagued with the problems it has today. Also a video broadcasting platform where video is not limited to your circle, wouldn't have the problem as long as they can get a sizeable mass which being YT they should be able to.

I predict they will try to shove it down our throats, for example by adding a dedicated button for inserting shorts in the keyboard app.

Or adding it to your Google feed as a mandatory section, making people hate it even more.

Instagram is already doing this, pushing Reels on the Discover tab, and in your personal feed.

While my Discover tab shows content closely linked to accounts I follow (music, comics, visual artists, sports), the Reels are scantily clad high schoolers dancing and lip syncing, which is what I imagine sells on TikTok.

After Google screwed up my music transfer from Google Play to YouTube Music, I'm not using any new Google services.

And it's not like there is any customer service to fix their own problems.

I had a 3 year account containing videos of my game completely wiped without any notification. The account was terminated. I appealed and the bot effectively said "F you".

I have nearly deleted all Google services and my YouTube viewership is dwindling every month. I use one of the Invidious sites when I do watch YouTube sourced content.

I despise Google/YouTube with a passion.

My first thought at Google launching any new product/service is: "Heyy, another neat service that will live for 2-3 years before it gets axed."

Considering their 'stories' feature has received no useability improvements or features since its introduction that's probably justified.

TechAltar talks about using it for more than a year here: https://youtu.be/hePnMAL1eh4

On the other hand, isn't this about the time it takes from now until the next big social thing gains traction and TikTok et al goes the way of the Dodo? So the usual Google service half-life would just work here.

No, because Google never invests in making its products compelling until after they get huge, so they cancel the products before they get compelling.

Google+ put all its funding into cannibalizing other Google products against the will of those product builders and users, and none into making Google+ desirable.

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