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TikTok hits 1.5B downloads, outperforming Instagram

(www.businessinsider.com)
298 points elorant | 6 comments | 19 Nov 19 14:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.656s | source | bottom
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bransonf ◴[19 Nov 19 15:30 UTC] No.21573859[source]▶
What amazes me is that Tik-Tok fills the void created when Twitter killed vine.

Given the popularity of Vine, and the outrage when Twitter killed it, I have no idea why they thought it was a good move.

I’m bullish on Tik-Tok because I think it’s the next logical evolution of social media (and totally captures the Vine fan base which was pretty big to begin with)

First there was text, both Facebook and Twitter. Then images with instagram. Now people want videos that they can consume in short bits of time en mass.

I think you would be amiss to not see TikTok as a potentially big player in social media in the future.

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JohnJamesRambo ◴[19 Nov 19 15:52 UTC] No.21574184[source]▶
> First there was text, both Facebook and Twitter. Then images with instagram. Now people want videos that they can consume in short bits of time en mass.

What you are describing is the continued fall to smaller and smaller bits of stimulation and information. I’m worried about the consequences of this on the human mind and humanity in general. Our tech is gradually eroding our ability to focus on anything for more than a few seconds. I don’t want a future that is some weird mix of Idiocracy and getting the Black Shakes from Johnny Mnemonic. We need people that aren’t easily manipulated by ads and disinformation campaigns and that can think long and clearly about something.

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1. RandallBrown ◴[19 Nov 19 15:55 UTC] No.21574236[source]▶
Videos encode way more information than a snippet of text.

If anything, social media is moving the opposite way, where people are requiring more stimulation and information.

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2. thawaway1837 ◴[19 Nov 19 15:57 UTC] No.21574261[source]▶
I think it’s somewhere in between.

More stimulation but less information.

3. TeMPOraL ◴[19 Nov 19 19:58 UTC] No.21577546[source]▶
More information, at least in the information-theory sense, but much less knowledge. I.e. videos are much less efficient than text, or even static pictures. Take a second of the most insightful video you can find, and in the same space, you could easily cram an entire textbook on the same topic, complete with high-resolution images.
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4. asdff ◴[19 Nov 19 20:12 UTC] No.21577746[source]▶
Just pulling a transcript of a given video, timing your reading, and comparing it to the length of the video would make this evident. And that's if the information delivery is perfectly optimized, which in most cases it's not. Compare 1hr of CNN to a 1hr college political science lecture, for example.
5. stjohnswarts ◴[19 Nov 19 22:06 UTC] No.21578824[source]▶
depends on the image and the text. teens dumping goo on their brother's head and then running away are essentially useless compared to a wiki paragraph on the holocaust.
6. randompi ◴[20 Nov 19 03:30 UTC] No.21580873[source]▶
> people are requiring more stimulation and information

Perhaps I'm old, but TikTok failed to get me back over and over again.