Hacker News Reader

Comment by zjaffee | Hacker News Reader

I have to disagree with that, snapchat was just as innovative if not more so in the early days of tiktok and musically in the space around camera filters and editing.

There are two big things that make tiktok unique. The for you page, and shared sounds that are able to go very viral rapidly. No other platform has been able to circulate viral videos as quickly as tiktok has proven to be able to, and the for you page, rather than encouraging people to actually follow individual accounts, means that people are actually seeing the videos that keep them on the app the longest (and in turn off other apps), rather than having to curate their own feeds.

View on HN

> shared sounds that are able to go very viral rapidly

Shared sounds was a nifty innovation and TikTok executed it well.

While FB always focused on their vaunted friends graph, there was an entirely separate graph waiting to be discovered which had nothing to do with friendship:

i.e. A graph of people worldwide who have lipsynced (or danced) to the same tune. It's a clever way to inject novelty (and dopamine) into the system!

Seems obvious in retrospect, of course.

> Shared sounds was a nifty innovation and TikTok executed it well.

Also, shared sounds and music cross languages and boundaries more smoothly than hashtags.

So a Spanish song can suddenly become viral in Eastern Europe, or a Thai song become viral in Latin America.

I like Snapchat, though I never properly used to because I don't know anyone who uses it. I have been entertaining that app only because of its originality and I do appreciate their innovative spirit. I believe FB has copied their features and Snap continues to be an underdog.

Also, FB apparently was running VPN apps in disguise to monitor the traffic of the younger audience[0] to identify upcoming competition and crush it.

IMHO, this behaviour of the established players destroyed the innovation in America, lost it to China. I remember, at one point it became unfashionable to create new social networks or invest in them but it turns out, FB is not the end of history.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/29/facebook-project-atlas/

> for you page, rather than encouraging people to actually follow individual account.

I like that Tiktok has two feeds.

A feed from people you follow and an algorithmic for you page.

I find this approach better when compared to IG and FB which combine two feeds in one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com