TikTok Remix Culture

TikTok really is incredible. I don't do much in the way of social media, but it's better than any other big app I've ever used.

The other really cool use I've seen of this style of stitching is emergent songs. Here's an example: https://www.tiktok.com/@patwhoisnice/video/69158104300531089...

Also, it's the first social platform I've seen that has solved the new user growth problem - every user's first few videos are guaranteed hundreds of views no matter what. So good content naturally rises without having to be spammy/promote itself. Compare that to something like Twitch where growing a stream to even getting 30 regular viewers can take years of grinding and a ton of hustle.

The average follower count for even just a regular user who has maybe 1-2 good videos can be in the low thousands.

As someone who doesn't use Tiktok, how can Tiktok guarantee at least hundreds of views for all videos on their platform?

How do they entice users to click on these videos hundreds of times?

You don't click on videos. The main screen of TikTok is an algorithmic feed that shows you one fullscreen video, you can choose to watch it or scroll to the next video. Thus, they can derive all sorts of useful info from every interaction on every video and feed it back into the algo

You don't pick videos to play (unless you're in their search interface or browsing a user's profile), you just swipe for the next video. It's an infinitely scrolling list.

You don't click. When you open the app, the first thing you see is a "random" video (selected by their creepily good algorithm). Watched it or don't like it? Swipe through and the next video instantly starts. The app is good at figuring out which videos get engaged with and promotes these.

Though there is the functionality to go to user profiles and click videos, like on Instagram and such, it's not the main functionality of the app.

Chinese livestreaming platforms have an addiction to inflating numbers, so I'm not sure if those are all real, or just growth hacking and user retention tricks.

Since it's just senconds long and users will switch if they don't like the first few seconds, the sunk cost is relatively low.

> I've seen that has solved the new user growth problem

There's always a cost, established celebs have trouble keeping up their fame. There's always some big players quit Douyin (Chinese version of Tiktok) after burn out. No one rules Tiktok forever (which is a good thing for consumers)

It is so "incredible" its on the front page of every newspaper in the world today, for how quickly it can spread the "Kill the Jew" meme.

When the tools have become simple enough that second graders can play with nuclear bombs we are all fucked.

The other thing TikTok does well is that it removes choice. On YouTube you look at a dozen videos and think "Do I want to watch any of these, or look at another dozen recommendations?" It's kind of similar to picking something on Netflix. With TikTok you can just mindlessly "Next, next, next".

I am not one to get hooked on social media, but I found myself wasting time so easily on TikTok I had to delete it from my phone.

That’s not a cost for Tiktok though, rather the opposite. They just need content to keep going, they don’t need to make individual creators rich necessarily. From their perspective the more control they have over who is popular, the better.

It could become a problem for them if another app offered creators a better deal, but such an app still has network effects to contend with (you can offer creators a better deal but if the viewers don’t follow them it won’t work).

I heard their algorithm is quantized — first your video is “piloted” with a small set of people that are guaranteed to see it.

Then, if it passes a metric, it graduates to a bigger pool of people.

And then one more level.

There are plenty of experiments on this, testers opened new accounts and almost immediately they had hundreds of viewers, but when asked to repond in exchange for cash, no one did.

I mean, what's stopping them from doing this, everyone seems to be happy about it.

Initially they called these numbers "viewer count", but apparently it got too embarrassing even for themselves, one streamer reached 5.9 billion. Then they call it "popularity index" since everybody knew it's fake.

> The other thing TikTok does well is that it removes choice.

So its like a millennial TV? :)

> when asked to repond in exchange for cash, no one did

Sounds like scam, honestly. How do you get that cash to me? Cause I just don't feel like giving my account number to someone on tiktok.

You know, that's not too different from how HN works.

TikTok and twitch are not same content-wise. It's to feed your content to people if it's just a few seconds. The platform depends on feeding a huge number of very fast changing content to the viewers. That makes it also very simple to analyze the reception of your content.

That's something impossible on a slow paced medium like live-streaming. But the other side us that it's very hard to make real money with TikTok, because all the juicy sellouts that work on long videos and live-streaming, don't transist very well to short clips and a platform with low attention.

Because of that follower-count on tiktok has not the same worth as on other platforms. 1000 Tiktok-follower is like 1 twitch or youtube-follower. People are just getting elluded by the high numbers.

Like join WeChat fan groups? It's called private traffic, taking back control of your fame, and better milk your fans.

One big selling point of these predominantly female streamers is the previledge to add their personal WeChat, what for? Well, it's all about money and exchange.

The red-packet/micro-transaction thing is pretty big in China.

This offer was made to random users. Not to performers that live from it, whether porn work or not.