Firebrand

I wonder if it’s intentional that Facebook products were omitted from Apple’s list of apps to download for new iPhone users:

https://m.imgur.com/yT14ZVS

The mobile experience has improved for “normies” looking to consume funny pictures and videos on /r/popular, not the power users who comment or use niche subreddits.

The Reddit app’s push for live-streaming and their recent acquisition of DubSmash makes me suspect they’re looking to compete with TikTok as well.

I don’t know why people are underestimating Instagram Reels. Instagram may be becoming more of an entertainment app like TikTok but it is still a social network. All content creators care about is engagement, and having the ability to push your short video into your Stories and your follower’s main feed increases your chances of it being seen instead of relying on an algorithm.

I never really paid attention to just how massive Bytedance actually is until the article mentioned some of their products.

Makes sense how they had the resources to brute force TikTok into the American consciousness so quickly.

How does TikTok moderate their content anyway? Do they just have a massive amount of people scrolling through user reported videos looking for violations?

Being primarily video based and having the lowest barrier to upload seems like it would be a recipe for disaster.

Has anyone else noticed that Apple has started suggesting all of Facebook’s competitors as the first apps new iPhone owners should download?

https://i.imgur.com/OeyVGoM

Facebook doesn’t need spotlighting, but YouTube is just as well known and it’s third on the list.

Scott Galloway met a lot of backlash on Twitter for his take on the GameStop debacle but I’m starting to think he’s right:

https://twitter.com/profgalloway/status/1354532507723640835

There are a lot of frustrated men who spend most of their weekdays staring at a stock price go up and down and then post about it on Reddit instead of doing something productive. There’s no motivation to save money to buy a house with your significant other.

It’s oddly comforting to know Chinese social media and the influencers it creates seem to be just as insufferable as they are in the U.S.

Watching social media frame today as being orchestrated by some shadowy cabal was truly bizarre.

Robinhood just didn’t have the capital to clear trades of super volatile stocks. I think people would have understood if they just came out and said so yesterday.

3.57 million people left New York City this year to live out their lives in comfort someplace else, and then 3.5 million people hungry for opportunity arrived to take their place. I hope to see similar results in San Francisco.

TikTok seems like content moderation time bomb in general, and it makes me wonder if they’re struggling to attract brands when they can’t ensure their ads won’t end up appearing after a heroin production video that’s already racked up a half million views.

I found the lack of discussion of TikTok compared to the amount of heat Twitter and Facebook have been getting before and after the election surprising. Do people disregard it because they think it’s just dance and funny videos on there? There is a lot of political content if you go down that rabbit hole, and it’s ready to be seen by a much more young and impressionable user base compared to FB and Twitter’s.

It doesn’t bode well for society if kids and teenagers are spending more and more time watching YouTube videos and Twitch streamers compared to scripted shows, then.

This is why the U.S. government is so concerned about TikTok being used as a propaganda tool by the Chinese government:

https://m.tiktok.com/v/6880901448872234245.html

Make a video about disaffected military enlistees go viral on an app filled with impressionable young teens and it’ll discourage them enlisting in the future. Then the algorithm drip feeds them more anti-American content until they become more jaded about the country as a whole.

There’s certainly a discussion to be had about the way the U.S. treats its service members, but I just don’t trust TikTok being the impetus of it.

Unsealed court opinon:

https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.222257/...

Nichols says while emergency economic powers of the president (IEEPA) give Trump broad latitude on national security, TikTok falls under an exemption for "informational materials," like a news wire and "personal communication"

I get the feeling the Trump Administration’s lawyers are going to fumble the full ban lawsuit in November allowing Bytedance to retain control of TikTok. If this were an actual national security issue then you’d think they’d come up with more compelling reasons to remove it from the App Store.

Although heavily redacted, part of their claim is that US user data is stored on servers leased by a PRC state owned enterprise located in Virginia (China Telecom?).

TikTok has repeated said American user data is safe because it's stored in the US, and it would never give data to the PRC government. This arrangement could (depending on the specifics) be a circumvention around both of those promises.

Maybe it’s not nefarious, but certainly not good optics.

Bethesda Games are not going not be exclusive to Xbox -- Confirmed by Todd Howard:

>Like our original partnership, this one is about more than one system or one screen. We share a deep belief in the fundamental power of games, in their ability to connect, empower, and bring joy. And a belief we should bring that to everyone - regardless of who you are, where you live, or what you play on. Regardless of the screen size, the controller, or your ability to even use one.

https://bethesda.net/en/article/4IwKWIj174Cb2QNTTtBAEb/todd-...

>Let’s be very clear here. I am not a fan of TikTok. I had the misfortune of coming across it when it was still called Musically and I had to explain to a little girl that she, unlike her friends, was not allowed to dance for strangers. That ruined an otherwise perfect evening.

I realize this isn’t the main point of the post but I’m very surprised this is pretty much an accepted thing now. I would have thought the Trump administration or the media would weaponize the potential exploitation of children and turn a complex geopolitical struggle into a moral panic for the public to more easily understand.

My mistake. I left out the investment firms like Sequoia Capital, General Atlantic and Coatue, which would put majority ownership in U.S. hands. That’s what the Trump administration wants all along anyway.

What good is temporarily banning TikTok if Oracle and Walmart are taking majority ownership?

The user base will see the headlines that it’s being banned and then they’ll move to a rival service again like they did during the first scare. Especially since Triller just poached TikTok’s most popular creator, Charli D’Amelio, earlier this week. That coveted preteen demographic might never come back. It’s poisoning the well for Oracle.

Is there anyone that comes out worse from the U.S. + China TikTok saga than Kevin Mayer?

He left leading Disney's streaming division after being passed over for CEO to become Bytedance's COO and CEO of TikTok, only to leave three months later during the company's toughest time.

Now we learn Bytedance isn't actually selling its operations to Oracle and the the most valuable startup in the world marches on to market dominance without him. Huge reputation hit.

> Mr. Martin did not appear before the board. In a statement released on Friday night, Michel Stern, a representative for Mr. Martin, said: “Mr. Martin and his wife are frankly in the midst of processing this disappointing news. They are carefully weighing their options with their advisers.”

Hope his absence was due to him being too busy writing.

>Oracle is set to be announced as TikTok’s “trusted tech partner” in the U.S., and the deal is likely not to be structured as an outright sale, the person said.

Bytedance isn’t actually selling TikTok, and the White House gets its win.

Oracle becomes a trusted tech partner of Bytedance:

“ByteDance started opening data centers in India and the US in 2019. This may be strictly for internal purposes, but its possible they plan to launch a cloud hosting service. ByteDance acquired Terark in 2019 which allows databases to run 200x faster by reading compressed data at 50% of the cost. If they launch an external service, the selling point could be faster processing and access to some of ByteDance’s AI tech.

A cloud service combined with enterprise software (and eventually a phone or other hardware) would take a page out of Microsoft’s approach of bundling multiple products and selling them top down through the C- Suite.”

https://turner.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-tiktok-and-underst...

The algorithm is just a ranking of statistical probabilities—not some magic spell. Microsoft’s world class engineers could easily replicate that.

I’m not so sure if buying only TikTok’s U.S. user base is worth it, though. TikTok’s switching costs are much lower, and the network effects are weaker compared to something like Facebook/Instagram. Look at the amount of people uploading their watermarked TikTok videos to Reels. Build some decent video editing tools and they will come.

> Our systems, together with our moderation teams, have been detecting and removing these clips for violating our policies against content that displays, praises, glorifies, or promotes suicide. We are banning accounts that repeatedly try to upload clips

Repeatedly? If someone uploads video of a man blowing his brains out to an app mostly used by children then that person shouldn’t be given any leeway...

I've been seeing a lot of low to mid-tier creators dropping out of the payment program lately after their view counts plummeted. It's speculated that TikTok only pays for video completion count while enrolled in the Creator Fund since view counts tend to go back up after leaving.

Having more leverage with third parties outweighs the tens of dollars they'd receive from a video, I guess.

Isn’t this problem why Walmart is interested in TikTok?

Teenager sees an article of clothing an influencer is wearing and then taps a button for it to be delivered with 2-day Walmart+ shipping in their size.

If China wishes to block the sale due to AI interface technologies then just sell the brand and user base.

Microsoft has world class engineers that could come up with a replacement algorithm that’s similar to Bytedance’s before the U.S. deadline anyway.