Considering Byte was made by the original Vine founder after he said he regretted selling Vine to Twitter, I'm not sure he'd be in the market to sell a successor quite so quickly.
YouTube is getting more annoying for me by the day. Recently I’ve been bombarded by YouTube ads from a shady fake news publication — one is dressed up as an infomercial, another is straight-up lies, etc. (Not gonna give them free publicity by naming them here.) Really distressed to see such crap next to COVID-19 info videos. You could argue that I should subscribe, but I typically only watch maybe one YouTube video every few days (more frequently these past few weeks though) so I don’t feel subscribing.
They really need to clean up their act before making another product focused on teens and young adults.
It's that algorithm, you gotta keep it tightly controlled or it goes off the rails. I watched about 6 tiny home videos with my wife and now my ENTIRE recommended list is tiny homes. So now I do a tiny home video or two, then a dog video or something, then perhaps reuters news, then back to tiny homes (or whatever kick im on at the moment).
Before this, I had accidentally left my you tube playing on DnD ambient sound videos, and it wrecked my recommendation lists lol.
My recommendations are okay as long as I turn off watch history. Mostly just celebrity bullshit and stuff. I don’t watch what’s recommended anyway.
Now the ads are another story. I already turned off personalizations and YouTube claims to base the ads on my location and the current video, which, if true, means a lot of people in the area watching COVID-19 related videos is being led to this very publication.
Absolutely, if I want to watch something unusual/new or out of my interests then I'm opening it in incognito tab. Few tiny mistakes and my feed could look like "Trending" tab shudders
Just about anything is better than a company beholden to the Chinese government getting a strong hold in global social media, but Alphabet isn't too far off the list of worst options. We badly need some new blood in the upper echelons of technology.
I would love to do something in this space and would love to know if anybody has ideas for or examples of a sustainable, scalable corporate structure that is less susceptible to these antipatterns and isn't focused on an exit. But that can still compete with the big players. Product is obviously a big part of it, but I think there needs to be some structural changes.
Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't it a fairly simple answer that most founders just prefer mindlessly chasing rounds of investment and "growth for the sake of growth" and cashing out on an exit, rather than just growing organically with minimal outside investment/influence?
Anyone can choose to build a quality app/service/startup based on the merit of the actual product with company growth fueled by actual need of technical talent and profits from a monetization model, rather than just taking venture capital and hiring six-figure salaried engineers just to fill another open office chair and implement selfie filters.
I wouldn't say it's mindless. Organic growth is okay for a lifestyle business, but if you want to compete with Google/FB/etc you need fast growth (or a really fucking good business plan). If you want fast growth then you need capital that you're okay with pissing away. You can front all that capital yourself if you're rich (e.g. Gabe Newell's M$ money going into Valve) or you go the VC route. VC route is simply less risky. Less chance of competition beating you to the punch, and no chance of losing all your money.
>option #1: a not for profit, so "the next Google" isn't owned by anyone.
>option #2: give every user a non transferable share of in a for profit entity so users are owners of "the next Google" and have "skin in the game" and incentive to use the product in lieu of Google.
I think your starting point is already flawed. Scale is needed for high value liquidity events which is needed for ROI to investors and employees compensated with equity.
If you realign the goal to return maximum value to your employees as soon as possible, then you can align incentives to maximize the creation and growth of markets to sustainably capture value and give it to the people that made it possible.
So just don't take VC money and build a company to give back to your employees as much as possible as soon as possible and do it without competing directly in any existing market or trying to take existing market share. Sounds tough.
To succeed in social, you need to exploit network effects to scale your user base. You might get a flash in the pan with some seeded content or go viral for a brief second. In the long run, you need to spend big and more than established competition even in niche markets if you want to create a beachhead. Even if you had the capital to do it yourself, you probably shouldn't since that's not smart in terms of risk. So then you will need to resort to investment from VCs (even angels can't fund a social product beyond seed). At that point, you have conflated your purpose from a do good-social enterprise to a venture that needs to provide 50x return for your investors.
Remember the value per user that acquiring companies pay for when they acquire said company and compare that to how much you will need to spend to acquire them from scratch. If you can't nail the distribution (sales & marketing) side of the equation, the product won't have a chance to get off the ground let alone survive.
It has nothing to do with nationalism. I'd be perfectly happy to see a, for example, Canadian, Japanese, or South African company doing well because their governments don't systemically murder dissenters and commit genocide. Every nation has room for improvement, but the people of China are being dominated by a group that anyone with a shred of morality ought to be very wary of.
> their governments don't systemically murder dissenters and commit genocide.
Which people has china committed genocide against? Don't say uyghurs as it would be an insult to the native americans, jews, armenians, etc who actually experienced real genocide.
> but the people of China are being dominated by a group that anyone with a shred of morality ought to be very wary of.
Dominated by a group that liberated china from brutal european, japanese and american colonizers? Dominated by a group that lifted 800 million chinese out of poverty?
If the chinese people don't want the chinese government, there is nothing the chinese government can do. Perhaps, just perhaps, the chinese government has done a lot of good as well? That's why they are able to maintain power? Maybe?
And if we are talking about morality, you haven't listed a single government that has morality.
>Which people has china committed genocide against? Don't say uyghurs as it would be an insult to the native americans, jews, armenians, etc who actually experienced real genocide.
What about good old fashioned Han Chinese? Mao's rule was devastating. Killed more than WWII killed /people/.
Also the kill number isn't the factor here. It's not call of duty. That's like saying people who died in Columbine should just stop whining because millions of Jews died.
> What about good old fashioned Han Chinese? Mao's rule was devastating. Killed more than WWII killed /people/.
Yes. And the american civil war killed more americans than every other war america was involved in. Doesn't make it a genocide. Genocide has a specific meaning. Using your definition, every war, civil war, etc is genocide. That's simply not true.
> Also the kill number isn't the factor here.
I agree so why the "Killed more than WWII killed /people/." nonsense?
> That's like saying people who died in Columbine should just stop whining because millions of Jews died.
Nobody calls columbine a genocide. That's the point. Once again, genocide has a very specific meaning.
> If the chinese people don't want the chinese government, there is nothing the chinese government can do.
Isn't this a bit naive? How do you figure dictatorships ever stay in place? When the power in place controls everything, uprising is almost impossible.
No. It's naive the other way around. Think about it. There are 1.4 billion chinese. There isn't a government more concerned about the "happiness" of their people than the chinese government. If the chinese people aren't "happy", then the government is blamed, attacked and destroyed - and many political leaders killed. Who do you think is more concerned with the welfare of their people - Xi or Trump? I'd say Xi since his very life depends on it while Trump could ruin the US and go back to his business and have the next president clean up his mess.
> How do you figure dictatorships ever stay in place?
How do you figure dictatorships ever lose their place?
> When the power in place controls everything
That's also true of democracies as well as dictatorships.
> uprising is almost impossible.
Uprisings are impossible when times are good. Peope revolt over empty stomachs and economic interests. All indications are times have been very good for the chinese people the last few decades. So I'd suspect most chinese are quite supportive of their government - especially now that they are engaged in a trade war. But then again, it's their country and their government. It's rather paternalistic to think the chinese are incapable of looking out for their best interests.
TikTok doesn't try to stalk me across the entire internet; if I'm concerned about its origin I can choose not to use it.
Google on the other hand attempts to stalk me everywhere (with their ads and analytics) regardless of whether I use their products directly or even have an account with them.
If I don't use their app then there will be no data to give away. This is a very good thing compared to Google and Facebook who litter the web with their crap regardless of whether you're using their products directly.
If you think the Chinese government is letting an opportunity like TikTok pass them by, then you are absurdly naive. I'm positive its creative shadow profiles just like google and facebook and twitter.
We had Vine, and was left by Twitter to die for no reason. Now TikTok has a social foothold that no amount of raw technological achievement will overcome; the Vine creator actually launched his own Vine 2.0 under a different name a few months ago. I can't even remember the name of it; probably nobody can, because TikTok isn't about the tech, it's about the network effect.
Google is most successful when it creates a technology that a) nobody else can create, and b) happens to be a brand-new product category that's so compelling that people adopt it purely on its technical merits. Search obviously had both; Stadia had a but not b. Their TikTok competitor won't have either.
The only thing it would have going for it is brand-recognition from YouTube, which still holds some amount of pull with Gen Z (though TikTok has been encroaching on that territory). I'm not holding my breath for it being a success.
Absolutely, it's been a talking point of big silicon valley companies that China picks winners so the US needs to allow monopolies to compete with China, but this completely ignores the fact that the way the USA has competed with communist countries in the past isn't to emulate them, but to beat them with real innovation.
Why not? What makes you think that? I frequently see 5 second ads on YouTube; why couldn't you play one of those every so often between <=60 second videos? Or have interstitial static ads in the scroll like Instagram does?
As someone who just jumped from Byte to TikTok, I'm excited to see what new innovations Shorts brings to the table. Correct me if I'm wrong, but YouTube is pretty much #1 in video management/processing/distribution/etc online and Google has _amazing_ photo+video analysis/editing/search.
I have high hopes for new kinds of filters (filters might be the wrong word, but TikTok has a lot of innovations in this area over the traditional Snapchat-esque "filters") and better search/recommendations, which should both go a _long_ way toward enabling the kind of creative videos that made TikTok blow up and also get them to the eyeballs that actually want to see them.
Some kind of seamless integration with YouTube would also be pretty amazing, since most of my friends only watch TikToks via YouTube compilations anyway and there's a lot of back-and-forth interactions (liking, following, commenting, viewing related videos, etc) that would make sense if both platforms were under the same roof.
If anyone wants to make money from Social Video, they're on YouTube. You have the MEGA Influencers who have been making insane amounts of money on Facebook (mostly from Instagram). But even big Influencers with 1M+ followings are having trouble monetizing their following to make $100k+ per year.
Vloggers on YouTube can do this pretty easily with 1/10th-1/20th the following.
Marketing spend for Influencers is gonna dry up faster than anything else. If Shorts can provide a real revenue stream (YouTube has everything in place for this), it will be extremely well positioned during this time.
Paul Graham taught me to not think of new products that remind me of old products as mere copycats. By that token, I am sure that the fact that Youtube could leverage its existing library of music will trump any network effects that Tiktok might have.
OK, so G/YT are ok with using licensed music for this specific platform, but almost any video of any length with music or vid whether fair use or not will get pulled at the 1st complaint, even if bogus on YT?
Their position is "In order to become a dominant force in short video we need to infringe copyright, so we're going to do that until we're dominant, then we're going to act shocked and outraged that people are infringing copyright on our plaform and start attacking the content creators that gave us our success in the first place".
Problem is that first stage is much harder if you're a multi-billion dollar company.
I love the content on Tik-Tok (America's youths are hilarious!), but I'm also excited for anything that will get YouTube off it's ruinous path of forcing creators to stretch a video that should be ~2 minutes into something 10 minutes long.
68 comments
[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadThey really need to clean up their act before making another product focused on teens and young adults.
Before this, I had accidentally left my you tube playing on DnD ambient sound videos, and it wrecked my recommendation lists lol.
Now the ads are another story. I already turned off personalizations and YouTube claims to base the ads on my location and the current video, which, if true, means a lot of people in the area watching COVID-19 related videos is being led to this very publication.
How would you compete (with/out Google) as [("search engine + ads") + privacy)] if you started now?
I do Google & Facebook -free marketing with clients... I believe it's a realm worth considering more.
Anyone can choose to build a quality app/service/startup based on the merit of the actual product with company growth fueled by actual need of technical talent and profits from a monetization model, rather than just taking venture capital and hiring six-figure salaried engineers just to fill another open office chair and implement selfie filters.
At least that's my understanding.
>option #1: a not for profit, so "the next Google" isn't owned by anyone.
>option #2: give every user a non transferable share of in a for profit entity so users are owners of "the next Google" and have "skin in the game" and incentive to use the product in lieu of Google.
If you realign the goal to return maximum value to your employees as soon as possible, then you can align incentives to maximize the creation and growth of markets to sustainably capture value and give it to the people that made it possible.
So just don't take VC money and build a company to give back to your employees as much as possible as soon as possible and do it without competing directly in any existing market or trying to take existing market share. Sounds tough.
Remember the value per user that acquiring companies pay for when they acquire said company and compare that to how much you will need to spend to acquire them from scratch. If you can't nail the distribution (sales & marketing) side of the equation, the product won't have a chance to get off the ground let alone survive.
Which people has china committed genocide against? Don't say uyghurs as it would be an insult to the native americans, jews, armenians, etc who actually experienced real genocide.
> but the people of China are being dominated by a group that anyone with a shred of morality ought to be very wary of.
Dominated by a group that liberated china from brutal european, japanese and american colonizers? Dominated by a group that lifted 800 million chinese out of poverty?
If the chinese people don't want the chinese government, there is nothing the chinese government can do. Perhaps, just perhaps, the chinese government has done a lot of good as well? That's why they are able to maintain power? Maybe?
And if we are talking about morality, you haven't listed a single government that has morality.
What about good old fashioned Han Chinese? Mao's rule was devastating. Killed more than WWII killed /people/.
Also the kill number isn't the factor here. It's not call of duty. That's like saying people who died in Columbine should just stop whining because millions of Jews died.
Yes. And the american civil war killed more americans than every other war america was involved in. Doesn't make it a genocide. Genocide has a specific meaning. Using your definition, every war, civil war, etc is genocide. That's simply not true.
> Also the kill number isn't the factor here.
I agree so why the "Killed more than WWII killed /people/." nonsense?
> That's like saying people who died in Columbine should just stop whining because millions of Jews died.
Nobody calls columbine a genocide. That's the point. Once again, genocide has a very specific meaning.
What color is the sky? Don't say blue!
I'll say it. Uighurs. Also Tibetans.
Isn't this a bit naive? How do you figure dictatorships ever stay in place? When the power in place controls everything, uprising is almost impossible.
No. It's naive the other way around. Think about it. There are 1.4 billion chinese. There isn't a government more concerned about the "happiness" of their people than the chinese government. If the chinese people aren't "happy", then the government is blamed, attacked and destroyed - and many political leaders killed. Who do you think is more concerned with the welfare of their people - Xi or Trump? I'd say Xi since his very life depends on it while Trump could ruin the US and go back to his business and have the next president clean up his mess.
> How do you figure dictatorships ever stay in place?
How do you figure dictatorships ever lose their place?
> When the power in place controls everything
That's also true of democracies as well as dictatorships.
> uprising is almost impossible.
Uprisings are impossible when times are good. Peope revolt over empty stomachs and economic interests. All indications are times have been very good for the chinese people the last few decades. So I'd suspect most chinese are quite supportive of their government - especially now that they are engaged in a trade war. But then again, it's their country and their government. It's rather paternalistic to think the chinese are incapable of looking out for their best interests.
Google on the other hand attempts to stalk me everywhere (with their ads and analytics) regardless of whether I use their products directly or even have an account with them.
Google is most successful when it creates a technology that a) nobody else can create, and b) happens to be a brand-new product category that's so compelling that people adopt it purely on its technical merits. Search obviously had both; Stadia had a but not b. Their TikTok competitor won't have either.
The only thing it would have going for it is brand-recognition from YouTube, which still holds some amount of pull with Gen Z (though TikTok has been encroaching on that territory). I'm not holding my breath for it being a success.
I've found that TikTok is increasingly becoming a promotion channel for people's youtube channels or ig accounts.
If YouTube Shorts has the same revenue-sharing model as YouTube Normal, then this could be a serious advantage for them.
I have high hopes for new kinds of filters (filters might be the wrong word, but TikTok has a lot of innovations in this area over the traditional Snapchat-esque "filters") and better search/recommendations, which should both go a _long_ way toward enabling the kind of creative videos that made TikTok blow up and also get them to the eyeballs that actually want to see them.
Some kind of seamless integration with YouTube would also be pretty amazing, since most of my friends only watch TikToks via YouTube compilations anyway and there's a lot of back-and-forth interactions (liking, following, commenting, viewing related videos, etc) that would make sense if both platforms were under the same roof.
Vloggers on YouTube can do this pretty easily with 1/10th-1/20th the following.
Marketing spend for Influencers is gonna dry up faster than anything else. If Shorts can provide a real revenue stream (YouTube has everything in place for this), it will be extremely well positioned during this time.
I legitimately do not understand their position.
edit: word.
Problem is that first stage is much harder if you're a multi-billion dollar company.