Staying away from the politics, anybody who has a business model completely dependent upon a single service’s algorithm should question what kind of business they have.
Many successful businesses specialize in a niche. Mastering the algorithms of a single, popular platform can be a strategic advantage. Think of SEO experts or social media marketing firms.
This can be true at the same time the parent comment is. Advantages can be short-lived. I suppose the key is just not to take them for granted, or be surprised when they disappear.
Correct in theory, false in practice. Case in point : google adwords / adsense. It’s been close to 20 years and counting, and lots of the online ad economy is still relying almost exclusively on it.
Not sure what your point is. If you rely heavily on Google search traffic or ads, and get banned you are in the same boat. Id say it’s still correct, because the point OP was trying to make is, don’t run a business that can fail entirely because of another entities whims.
It might make sense if you have tons of profitable business options and you have to choose one, but that is rarely the situation.
There are billion dollar companies that run on AdWords, and the owners are far better off than if they refused to run a business with a single point failure, and worked at a coffee shop.
Hundreds of billions of dollars flow through AdWords to businesses that would NOT be better off without the revenue.
And if all these Google-dependent companies had diversified a bit, put some money in other ad networks as they grew (even if small amounts), then maybe Google wouldn't dominate all ad revenue. But that would require leaving a small amount of money on the table, so nope, I guess.
I'm sure you have the same sympathy for Coal workers, Steel workers, Mom & Pop Retail, right? or is this specially reserved for people who make a living out of content creation, just because you don't like it
Lol, they realize it's a sell-or-ban bill, right? Kind of a moot point when you realize that TikTok as we know it will continue, just without a connection to the CCP. Even if they do ban TikTok the company, the engineers/ML scientists who developed the recommender system powering TikTok still exist, so worst comes to worst someone makes a new company, hires the engineers, and off to the races
China has already indicated it won't sell its 20% share, and so TikTok will be removed from the US app stores.
And any replacement would be US only, limiting its reach to some 10% of what it had before.
This is why most people view this as a ban. And IMO, rightfully so; it's not as if our congressmen and congresswomen are fumbling about in the dark. They've just bought.
The rest of the world will likely follow. Also most of the world has already accepted that US tech firms have all their data, but don’t want China to have it. If there’s a feasible alternative to TikTok then banning it in Indonesia or Poland or Brazil becomes much easier for the politicians.
Beijing has a veto on the sale, and are likely to exercise it. From their point of view, allowing the US to force a Chinese company to sell itself off as soon as it achieves success would set a very bad precedent, and encourage a torrent of other blackmail efforts.
They'll be willing to let Bytedance take the L on this. Bytedance can console themselves that TikTok can still operate elsewhere on the world, just making less money.
Not sure how this is "dishing it out and not taking it". They intend to "take it"; they will force Bytedance not to sell, and thereby lose its US business with no compensation.
What a wild take. You know they spent multiple billions of dollars on advertising to get their userbase? Which without, algorithms don't work. The best algo in the world means nothing if there are only a million people using the thing.
If we are not careful, millions of people will have to resort to obtaining employment. Luckily we'll still have Twitch, Kick, playing the meme stock market, and gambling for them to fall back on.
Also illegal drug sales may taper off for a while but they'll find snap to be quite cozy again.
Beyond what the article says, something that is very hard to quantify is whether the promise of fame on TikTok causes its users to spend more than they otherwise would, even in excess of the income they actually receive from either TikTok or its effect on the promotion of their ventures. Recessions may well have been triggered by less.
> causes its users to spend more than they otherwise would
The promise of fame is not exceptional. The type of person who on an implicit promise makes decisions that are damaging to their own lives possibly have a larger problem then the exact ownership specifics of one single media company.
> Recessions may well have been triggered by less.
What percentage of the working age population is actually using social media in this unhealthy way? Is there a better solution that doesn't involve outright taking decisions away from everyone else?
Yes. How dare a company encourage people to contact their representatives, and ask them to represent them. So utterly discourteous to the congressmen and lobbyists.
I am old enough to remember US internet companies spamming users to support net neutrality, even those who aren't American and can't do anything about it. And net neutrality was heck of a lot less of an existential issue for them.
Do they think TikTok's user base will disappear overnight? There are a thousand competitors out there, and one of them will fill the gap. There may be a temporary disruption, sure, but that is still better than having a key chunk of the American economy (and young American eyeballs) directly controlled by the CCP.
They certainly won't disappear overnight. In fact, they will be very, very upset with those that took their platform away. Millions of upset people, and, if you're worried about the CCP, well, they'll have plenty of time to tell those millions of very upset people anything they'd like.
So really on either end of this, well, you have potentially bad outcomes. What's worse, people watching cat dance videos, or, people who are upset and vulnerable potentially being shown how to escape their negative emotions by your enemy.
I'd say the latter really. That and the bill is far too broad, being that any company can be forced to sell or get banned, provided they have sufficient link to a country that has been determined to be 'adversarial', which, reads to me as "literally any app the USGOV doesn't like".
Either way, I look forward to TikTok forcing the DOJ to prove that China, our biggest trade partner, signer of more than a few treaties, regional political partner, is adversarial. It's gonna be super fun, and probably thrown out immediately.
And, well, if it isn't, we can look forward to literally any publicly traded platform cow-towing to washington's whims, which will also be very fun being that power tends to flip flop constantly. One second you can only be pro-abortion on facebook, oops, democrats lost an election, now you can only be anti-abortion. Sounds great doesn't it? But hey, at least we stuck it to those commies data mining our cat dance videos.
Every US publicly traded company of course has to kowtow [0] to the US national agenda. How else could it work?
The cold war with China is here to stay. Trump started it, Biden continued it, and now it's on the agenda for good. China is openly striving to supplant the US as the premier power. [1]
There's a difference between playing along with what the US government wants and having to have a parallel chain of command with CCP "party cells" in your company.
And there's more than enough US companies actively opposing what the US government want, most notably Google who went and encrypted all their internal traffic so that it couldn't be tapped any more.
> There's a difference between playing along with what the US government wants and having to have a parallel chain of command with CCP "party cells" in your company.
That's exactly what I'm saying. TikTok needs to play ball (be sold in the US) or get banned.
It's one thing to fight against various regulations like Google did in your example, but when you're actively seeking to undermine the nation, that's a whole different ballgame.
And it wasn’t just the CIA roundup, it was in multiple political/economic/military domains around 2012 that China started making clear their decision to suddenly reverse what had been decades of putting in a ton of effort and money into embracing the west. This caught many by surprise because the behavior seems bizarre from a western point of view. Instead China became increasingly aggressive to it’s neighbors and started using the west as adversaries to try to fan the flames of its version of nationalism, in order to distract from their many home issues.
There was a reluctantly growing recognition of this, but Trump finally forced the public recognition of the issue in his characteristic camera grabbing way. Whether his efforts and characterization of the issue where ultimately helpful or harmful… is quite debated. Likewise our current attempts at a response continues to be occasionally questionable.
If you are curious beyond more than this extremely barebones summary, there are a mile of books and days of videos on the topic, though I don’t have any personal recommendations offhand since that isn’t really my wheelhouse, just something I watched build up over the years and start effecting my industry (agriculture).
It’s similar to how Europe had increasingly considered Russia to be moving into their big umbrella despite the occasional murder here and there. Hence the oil pipelines and deals. It took until the second time that Putin made his move on Ukraine before the illusion that Russia was ever a geopolitical friend was finally shattered.
> but Trump finally forced the public recognition of the issue in his characteristic camera grabbing way
Not really, and I was there when all this happened in the Obama admin and am still friends with people who worked on this.
The reality is after the OPM hack there was bipartisan support at the policymaker level to tamp down on the Chinese government for major transgressions. Chinese officials began getting sanctioned and most of the policies Trump boasted about were written and passed before his time.
Presidents don't really do much regarding these topics - it's always career bureaucrats and policymakers who are actually setting the gears in motion for these kinds of changes.
Is your argument that we shouldn’t ban TikTok because the CCP can manipulate upset users? Isn’t that one of the reasons we’re banning it in the first place?
For example, consider Brexit from the perspective or a remainer. It's quite reasonable to believe that the leave referendum would have failed if it wasn't done at a time when (sometimes a bit vague) frustration at the EU has escalated to the point that it had. It's not always "better late than never".
For a less political example, health interventions can be too late and not better late than never. Some cancer care that is long overdue is better to forego. The patient would suffer less and overall have a better quality of their remaining life with palliative care.
Business also follows this rule sometimes. If the right decision isn't made in time, it can later become throwing good money after bad and it's better to weather the consequences of the decision that wasn't made in time.
This is also explored in broken power laws. What is a good idea up to a certain point can turn into a bad idea very suddenly afterwards.
No, not making an argument, just a comment that, if you're worried about the CCP data mining US users, banning tiktok is a bad way to fix that problem.
Realistically, this falls under the "solving a human problem with tech", which is to say, it's not going to work. What you need to do is to educate the users. The problem is, the USGOV is data mining US users, and, if they were to educate users on how to avoid CCP data mining, they'd also defacto be educating them on how to avoid domestic data mining as well.
Of course, that would be a net-positive for society as a whole, it'll just never happen. They could also pass comprehensive user privacy protections, which, they won't do for similar reasons.
What you're really seeing play out here, is USGOV/CCP incentives matching, and the USGOV having a hard time navigating this legally because we do have at least some protection against massive unilateral government actions, whereas China has nothing of the sort.
You're free to think about data mining, narrative shaping, etc, any way you'd like. I know many think that it's nbd, many think that only the CCP doing it is bad because the USGOV is a force for good, many think that the CCP doing it is ok but the USGOV doing it is bad.
I really do think that if you think the CCP is bad, and tiktok is used by them somehow, directly going after tiktok is a very bad idea that'll likely result in a lost court case and tiktok being a permanent fixture, along with any other app in a similar situation, because calling China a foreign adversary is, well, extremely hard to prove in court, no matter how true it is. Doing nothing would be better, and, if something must be done, teaching people what they're dealing with is the best option, even at the expense of a loss of domestic capabilities.
TikTok has one of the lowest bars to monetization out of all the major social media networks.
There is a large amount of creators on the platform that live off their content and eCommerce enabled through the platform. So it disappearing overnight would severely impact people who have a majority of their livelihood through the app.
Facebook. Twitter. YouTube. They all have short form video, but TikTok has a lot of features that just don't exist on other platforms.
Do you know for a fact that TikTok is not more beneficial to democracy than detrimental? Could it be possible that your opinion is based upon the various stories you have read on the matter, and could it be possible that those stories are misleading?
Ironically, TikTok is a good platform for learning about why people think the things they do, though it is also a very powerful tool for exacerbating the problem. Power of most any kind can be used for good or ill, and TikTok is certainly powerful. If I was in the controlling beliefs of the masses business, canceling TikTok is the first thing I would do also...and to make sure it gets done I would bundle it in with funding for Ukraine and Israel.
Awful lot of people on "Hacker" News incredibly worried about the livelihoods of people who look pretty and dance for 15 seconds for a living.
Any time one hears someone mention the phrase "content creator", one should, by default, execute s/content creator/manipulative parasite/ in their mind. The entire business is social engineering of our brains, en masse, and you should care as much of the livelihoods of these people as you would about an Enron executive, or Madoff or SBF associate.
That said, it doesn't matter who controls the platform. If it gets banned or purchased, the show still goes on, and the world is still worse off for it.
I suspect that most people on hacker news, when they say content creator, that’s a stand in for “customer”. Banning TikTok hurts their customers which in turn hurts them by interrupting their flow of income.
You clearly don't use TikTok. There is quite a lot more than just dancing for 15 seconds.
> Any time one hears someone mention the phrase "content creator", one should, by default, execute s/content creator/manipulative parasite/ in their mind.
111 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 195 ms ] threadIt might make sense if you have tons of profitable business options and you have to choose one, but that is rarely the situation.
There are billion dollar companies that run on AdWords, and the owners are far better off than if they refused to run a business with a single point failure, and worked at a coffee shop.
Hundreds of billions of dollars flow through AdWords to businesses that would NOT be better off without the revenue.
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.homyt.thex
And any replacement would be US only, limiting its reach to some 10% of what it had before.
This is why most people view this as a ban. And IMO, rightfully so; it's not as if our congressmen and congresswomen are fumbling about in the dark. They've just bought.
The rest of the world will likely follow. Also most of the world has already accepted that US tech firms have all their data, but don’t want China to have it. If there’s a feasible alternative to TikTok then banning it in Indonesia or Poland or Brazil becomes much easier for the politicians.
They'll be willing to let Bytedance take the L on this. Bytedance can console themselves that TikTok can still operate elsewhere on the world, just making less money.
Until the CCP decides to allow a level playing field for US companies operating in China they can go pound sand as far as I’m concerned.
Divest completely, sell it to a US based company, or exit the company from US markets.
They are not our ally.
Also illegal drug sales may taper off for a while but they'll find snap to be quite cozy again.
I’m always amazed at how many accounts openly sell drugs, I report them, meta says they are ok.
https://archive.is/SoSw9
Beyond what the article says, something that is very hard to quantify is whether the promise of fame on TikTok causes its users to spend more than they otherwise would, even in excess of the income they actually receive from either TikTok or its effect on the promotion of their ventures. Recessions may well have been triggered by less.
The promise of fame is not exceptional. The type of person who on an implicit promise makes decisions that are damaging to their own lives possibly have a larger problem then the exact ownership specifics of one single media company.
> Recessions may well have been triggered by less.
What percentage of the working age population is actually using social media in this unhealthy way? Is there a better solution that doesn't involve outright taking decisions away from everyone else?
I think the TikTook ban is stupid, but assigning TT this kind of importance in a generally fickle space is dumb.
TikTok has also “weaponized” their users to spam senators and house reps [1]
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/7/24093308/tiktok-congress-b...
TikTok is a scummy business
Something must be really really wrong.
So really on either end of this, well, you have potentially bad outcomes. What's worse, people watching cat dance videos, or, people who are upset and vulnerable potentially being shown how to escape their negative emotions by your enemy.
I'd say the latter really. That and the bill is far too broad, being that any company can be forced to sell or get banned, provided they have sufficient link to a country that has been determined to be 'adversarial', which, reads to me as "literally any app the USGOV doesn't like".
Either way, I look forward to TikTok forcing the DOJ to prove that China, our biggest trade partner, signer of more than a few treaties, regional political partner, is adversarial. It's gonna be super fun, and probably thrown out immediately.
And, well, if it isn't, we can look forward to literally any publicly traded platform cow-towing to washington's whims, which will also be very fun being that power tends to flip flop constantly. One second you can only be pro-abortion on facebook, oops, democrats lost an election, now you can only be anti-abortion. Sounds great doesn't it? But hey, at least we stuck it to those commies data mining our cat dance videos.
The cold war with China is here to stay. Trump started it, Biden continued it, and now it's on the agenda for good. China is openly striving to supplant the US as the premier power. [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowtow
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-26/xi-s-vow-...
And there's more than enough US companies actively opposing what the US government want, most notably Google who went and encrypted all their internal traffic so that it couldn't be tapped any more.
That's exactly what I'm saying. TikTok needs to play ball (be sold in the US) or get banned.
It's one thing to fight against various regulations like Google did in your example, but when you're actively seeking to undermine the nation, that's a whole different ballgame.
It was the OPM breach [0] and the brutal eradication of the CIA network within China [1] that tipped the scales
Mutual US-China espionage has been common for decades, but these two actions were a step too far.
[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Manageme...
[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%932012_killing_of...
There was a reluctantly growing recognition of this, but Trump finally forced the public recognition of the issue in his characteristic camera grabbing way. Whether his efforts and characterization of the issue where ultimately helpful or harmful… is quite debated. Likewise our current attempts at a response continues to be occasionally questionable.
If you are curious beyond more than this extremely barebones summary, there are a mile of books and days of videos on the topic, though I don’t have any personal recommendations offhand since that isn’t really my wheelhouse, just something I watched build up over the years and start effecting my industry (agriculture).
It’s similar to how Europe had increasingly considered Russia to be moving into their big umbrella despite the occasional murder here and there. Hence the oil pipelines and deals. It took until the second time that Putin made his move on Ukraine before the illusion that Russia was ever a geopolitical friend was finally shattered.
Not really, and I was there when all this happened in the Obama admin and am still friends with people who worked on this.
The reality is after the OPM hack there was bipartisan support at the policymaker level to tamp down on the Chinese government for major transgressions. Chinese officials began getting sanctioned and most of the policies Trump boasted about were written and passed before his time.
Presidents don't really do much regarding these topics - it's always career bureaucrats and policymakers who are actually setting the gears in motion for these kinds of changes.
For example, consider Brexit from the perspective or a remainer. It's quite reasonable to believe that the leave referendum would have failed if it wasn't done at a time when (sometimes a bit vague) frustration at the EU has escalated to the point that it had. It's not always "better late than never".
For a less political example, health interventions can be too late and not better late than never. Some cancer care that is long overdue is better to forego. The patient would suffer less and overall have a better quality of their remaining life with palliative care.
Business also follows this rule sometimes. If the right decision isn't made in time, it can later become throwing good money after bad and it's better to weather the consequences of the decision that wasn't made in time.
This is also explored in broken power laws. What is a good idea up to a certain point can turn into a bad idea very suddenly afterwards.
Realistically, this falls under the "solving a human problem with tech", which is to say, it's not going to work. What you need to do is to educate the users. The problem is, the USGOV is data mining US users, and, if they were to educate users on how to avoid CCP data mining, they'd also defacto be educating them on how to avoid domestic data mining as well. Of course, that would be a net-positive for society as a whole, it'll just never happen. They could also pass comprehensive user privacy protections, which, they won't do for similar reasons.
What you're really seeing play out here, is USGOV/CCP incentives matching, and the USGOV having a hard time navigating this legally because we do have at least some protection against massive unilateral government actions, whereas China has nothing of the sort.
You're free to think about data mining, narrative shaping, etc, any way you'd like. I know many think that it's nbd, many think that only the CCP doing it is bad because the USGOV is a force for good, many think that the CCP doing it is ok but the USGOV doing it is bad.
I really do think that if you think the CCP is bad, and tiktok is used by them somehow, directly going after tiktok is a very bad idea that'll likely result in a lost court case and tiktok being a permanent fixture, along with any other app in a similar situation, because calling China a foreign adversary is, well, extremely hard to prove in court, no matter how true it is. Doing nothing would be better, and, if something must be done, teaching people what they're dealing with is the best option, even at the expense of a loss of domestic capabilities.
There is a large amount of creators on the platform that live off their content and eCommerce enabled through the platform. So it disappearing overnight would severely impact people who have a majority of their livelihood through the app.
Facebook. Twitter. YouTube. They all have short form video, but TikTok has a lot of features that just don't exist on other platforms.
Ironically, TikTok is a good platform for learning about why people think the things they do, though it is also a very powerful tool for exacerbating the problem. Power of most any kind can be used for good or ill, and TikTok is certainly powerful. If I was in the controlling beliefs of the masses business, canceling TikTok is the first thing I would do also...and to make sure it gets done I would bundle it in with funding for Ukraine and Israel.
Any time one hears someone mention the phrase "content creator", one should, by default, execute s/content creator/manipulative parasite/ in their mind. The entire business is social engineering of our brains, en masse, and you should care as much of the livelihoods of these people as you would about an Enron executive, or Madoff or SBF associate.
That said, it doesn't matter who controls the platform. If it gets banned or purchased, the show still goes on, and the world is still worse off for it.
> Any time one hears someone mention the phrase "content creator", one should, by default, execute s/content creator/manipulative parasite/ in their mind.
k