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> all 40 employees

Hopefully that saves the click for someone.

yeah - would be good to update the title given scale of recent layoffs?
Thank you. That's why I read the comments first. Considering tiktok is banned in india, it would have been surprising if they had anything but a skeletan crew to wind down their operation in india.
not super surprising considering the app is banned in India
Given the brainrot it seems to be gifting the world more countries should be banning it.
How is tiktok any more or less brain rot than say hacker news?
One is industrial strength endless stream of mindless shortform entertainment that some of the best ML engineers work tirelessly to make more addicting. The other is a software and startup page that’s basically from the 90s that gets new content roughly about once a day.
You could definitely browse hacker news as long as you could tiktok. In both cases there’s plenty of content if you actually go to the source links.

Mindless seems to be an opinion. What’s mindless about it?

> more addicting

I think it's clear(from research) that problematic social media use (defined as preoccupation and compulsion to excessively engage in social media platforms despite negative consequences) is bad for you mental health, but calling it an addiction feels like a stretch. It also isn't clear that it's much worse than staring at reality tv all day. I also seems like rates of problematic use among adolescents is in the low single digits basically everywhere that people use social media. Given the prevalence of social media use, it's not all that catastrophic that some 4% of users are over doing it. Americans at least seem to be more likely to drink excessively than have problematic relationships with social media.

HN has noprocrast, but otherwise yeah, same as. Only thing is that at the end, your rotted brain can now talk about Google discontinuing products, Apple CSAM, and Amazon inventory commingling. You will also be unable to dance.
Fwiw, I sometimes use TikTok and none of my content is dancing, it's mostly food, pop science and people doing epoxy art. I know there's TikTok dances but they never appear in my feed.
Also fwiw, for healthy adults, the Department of Health and Human Services recommends 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity a week, or a bit over 10 mins a day, and dancing, especially with other people, is a fun way of getting those 10 mins in.
Stop advocating banning things that don’t fit our belief system/ethics/worldview. No more asking to ban TikTok, Twitter, Trump, Biden.

No more banning. D'you understand?! Even... and I want to make this absolutely clear... even if they do say Jehovah!

Do you also believe the world's countries should ban reddit? It's front page is littered with content taken directly from TikTok.
Why did they have employees there given they are banned there?
They gave them work for their EMEA and Latin America teams after India banned the app. They were also clear they would likely downsize.

All in all, about as decent as one can expect a company to treat you.

Banned how? What's to do stop someone from just installing the APK?
tiktok.com itself is banned. You will have to use a VPN as well to bypass it.
There is no airtight way to ban a domain. Not in the age of DoH and TLS1.3
yes there is. SNI is still plaintext.

ESNI is dead. ECH is taking its sweet time.

TikTok could implement ECH in a day. If they hosted it on a generic AWS IP, it would be effectively impossible to block.
The real question is who wants to use Tik Tok that badly and if it is even health to want to do so.
People did actually do this for a few months but ultimately the competitors because good enough that they just switched
> What's to do stop someone from just installing the APK?

The manual process of just installing the APK.

The servers would be banned but TikTok itself is complying and blocking Indian Ips
Loaction information from sim card is checked after installing apk of TikTok. And if location found to be banned country like India , then installed app itself will not work.
Apps haven't had access to IMEI info for several years
Doesn't India have its own version?